Currently 11 active ai and ai safety grants, fellowships and residencies open to applicants in the EU. Hand-curated and updated weekly. Almost every entry is funded; a few notable unpaid open calls and festival submissions are included as clearly flagged exceptions. Browse the list below, or use the interactive desk for filtering and shortlisting.
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The annual DARC PhD/Research Workshop, organised by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center at Aarhus University with transmediale, responds to transmediale's 2027 thematic framework. THEME: 'Interstices: Research (in) the gaps'. An interstice is the small space between objects set closely together, the cords in a rope or the atoms in a crystal lattice: an emptiness produced by the structure it belongs to, and without which that structure could not be what it is. In crystallography, interstitial sites are the spaces a lattice and its basis generate but do not fill, and interstitial diffusion, the movement of small atoms through the gaps of a host lattice, is the mechanism by which materials transform. The call asks what the equivalent sites are in social, cultural and computational structures: where are the gaps these combinations generate but do not fill, what moves through them, and do they carry transformative power? It works through Yancey Strickler's dark forest theory of the internet (the withdrawal of meaningful exchange from the open, surveilled, indexed web into private channels), the Dark Forest Collective's anthology and its 'cozyweb' of small sheltered spaces, dark nets, miniverses and moving castles as interstitial spaces produced by and defined against the dominant web, and Bogna Konior's extension of the dark forest metaphor to the opacity of AI systems, where silence is refusal rather than absence and the forest is increasingly inhabited by other-than-human intelligences that opt out of engagement with people. Where big tech pursues efficiency through the automation of human perception, cognition, identification and aesthetics, artists and researchers explore the non/more-than-human, glitchy, noisy, machinic, datafied and dark to build new expression and critique of data-ism and what is marketed as artificial intelligence, including the dangers and potentials inside badly curated data models, between polluting data centres, and in skeuomorphic interfaces. WHAT THEY WANT: proposals from artists, researchers and practitioners for work that occupies and moves through gaps that are social as well as structural, ontological and material. The gaps are physical too: the heat of data centres and their thirst for water, latency in the cables, unindexed nodes. The call invites speculations, practical interventions and inferences that fill the gaps and expand the diversity of possible communications and communities that can inhabit dark forests, including those built on, against and beneath the infrastructures underlying them, and welcomes work on the (dis-)continuous histories of technological exploration of computational infrastructures over the last 30 years or longer, and on how current artistic, theoretical and technical explorations repeat or break from them. WHO: PhD candidates and early-career researchers, with submissions welcome from researchers inside and outside the academy, including artists, designers and curators. PARTICIPANT EXPECTATIONS: participants write a paper and present it at the workshop, and on the basis of that peer review shorten the research into a newspaper-length article for distribution at the transmediale festival. The workshop is led by scholars from DARC at Aarhus University. DEADLINE: 28 August 2026, 23:59 CEST, via the application link on the call page. Queries to Pablo Velasco, pvelasco[at]cc.au.dk.
Human Rights Watch is hiring an AI Strategy and Solutions Lead into its Operations Department to build the foundation for responsible AI adoption across the organisation. The role deliberately sits between strategy and execution: assessing organisational readiness, mapping partnerships and governance, and also prototyping and shipping working systems. THE WORK, in four strands. (1) STRATEGY AND READINESS: with the CIO and the Information Security and Technology (IST) leadership team, build an AI strategy covering data foundation requirements, infrastructure gaps and organisational readiness; assess current state and shape a roadmap balancing quick wins against long-term capacity; research what peer nonprofit, humanitarian and human rights organisations are doing and find collaboration openings. (2) FLAGSHIP SOLUTIONS: work with departments to find high-impact use cases, translate business needs into technical approaches, build and deploy AI/ML solutions with measurable value (time saved, efficiency, better outcomes), using the Microsoft AI ecosystem (Copilot Studio, Azure AI, Power Platform) among other tools, and oversee consultants and vendors to extend delivery capacity. (3) ADOPTION AND CAPACITY: balance onboarding staff onto AI tools against building custom solutions where they amplify the organisation's strengths; write training material pitched at different work areas and skill levels covering prompting and responsible use; support working groups and communities of practice; produce playbooks and guides for non-technical staff. (4) GOVERNANCE: partner with IST leadership on risk assessment frameworks, align solutions with security, infrastructure and architecture requirements, contribute to AI policy development and its operationalisation, set standards for evaluating proofs of concept and MVPs, and engage business units so outcomes are co-owned; all of it balanced against data quality, security and resource constraints and HRW's mission as a human rights organisation. WHO THEY WANT: a bachelor's degree or equivalent work experience in computer science, data science, information systems, mathematics, AI/ML implementation or a related technical field; a minimum of seven years' relevant experience including two to three years on AI and two to three years implementing AI/ML in production; experience contributing to technology strategy and assessing organisational readiness for new technology; strong Python and ML library/framework skills; hands-on predictive modelling, data science and statistical analysis; experience with low-code/no-code AI platforms such as Copilot Studio or Power Platform; a track record of scoping and delivering under resource constraints; a grasp of both generative AI and traditional ML; and the ability to explain technical concepts plainly to mixed audiences, engage stakeholders and lead technology adoption as an internal partner to business teams. PREFERRED: nonprofit, humanitarian or human rights experience; data privacy, security and ethical AI knowledge; familiarity with responsible AI frameworks and governance models; vendor and consultant management; and a background in politically sensitive or high-risk environments. APPLY: through the HRW job portal with a cover letter and CV, preferably as PDFs, by 30 August 2026. Only complete applications are reviewed and only shortlisted candidates are contacted; no calls or email enquiries. HRW states that it does not discriminate on the basis of disability, age, gender identity and expression, national origin, race and ethnicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation or criminal record.
The European AI & Society Fund is launching Building Narrative Power, a EUR 2 million funding and learning programme to counter Big Tech's dominance over how AI is understood, and to help people and communities shape new ways of thinking and talking about the technology they want. The Fund's strategy is to build the power of the public interest community to shape the direction of AI in Europe; narratives are central to creating the conditions for a greater say over how AI is adopted and used. THREE THEMES where research shows the public already feels strongly: (1) DATA CENTRES: as the EU aims to triple data centre numbers in the next five to seven years, pollution, energy prices and compromised grid access have mobilised communities across the political spectrum; proposals should explore narrative questions that move communities beyond resistance towards engagement in shaping data centre expansion. (2) AI AND JOBS: 57% of the public in a recent study expressed concern about how AI will change employment, more pronounced among lower-income people, and the concern is not only displacement but the quality and nature of work, autonomy and dignity; proposals should move the debate from generalised anxiety into a mobilising issue that shapes the future of work. (3) YOUNG PEOPLE: beyond the strident social media ban debate, young people encounter AI in education, friendships and future careers, and their wider views are rarely heard; proposals should build narratives that help young people shape the technologies that will influence their lives. LEARNING PROGRAMME: grantees join a community of practice, sharing experiences across issues and places, supporting each other through delivery and reflecting on which strategies and stories have most salience, with findings feeding back to the Fund and other funders. ABOUT THE FUNDER: the European AI & Society Fund is a pooled fund with 18 funding partners that mobilises a public interest community in Europe to fight for AI that serves people, society and planet; it takes no EU, government or Big Tech money. ELIGIBILITY: this call is only open to organisations in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Republic of Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland; applications from the UK, the Western Balkans and other non-European countries are not accepted. Guidance for applicants and a full application-form preview are published so you can prepare a draft before submitting. HOW TO APPLY: create an account on the Fund's application platform Optimy (link in the guidance documents) and submit the first-stage application before 31 August 2026. KEY DATES: call launched 16 July 2026; information sessions 22 July, 29 July and 24 August 2026 (11:00 to 12:00 CET); first-stage deadline 31 August 2026; unsuccessful applicants notified 16 October 2026; shortlisted applicants invited to submit a detailed proposal on 19 October 2026, due 16 November 2026; funding decisions notified 14 December 2026; grants start February 2027. Questions to info@europeanaifund.org; an FAQ covering eligibility, coalitions, non-profit status and what the grant can be spent on is published at the bottom of the programme page.
AIxDESIGN and the KB (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands) are building an exhibition and public programme about AI, made from the national collection, at the KB in The Hague. Nadia Piet is Creative Lead with the AIxDESIGN community, co-presented with the KB. The premise: long before neural nets, libraries were the machines we built to organise human knowledge, and the show uses the KB's collection to look at what AI is, where it comes from, and how it connects to the older story of how we store, sort, and search what we know. Part of the show lives in the KB Atelier, with talks, workshops, and screenings alongside, intended as AI literacy you can wander into. WHAT THEY WANT: work that engages AI in some way (critical, creative, hands-on, or playful); bonus if it also speaks to archives, libraries, or how we store and sort knowledge, though you do not need to touch the KB's collection to take part. You may pitch to more than one track: (A) SOMETHING FOR THE OPENING NIGHT, a performance, talk, screening, tour, ritual, booth, game, or other experience for the November 2026 opening, fee EUR 1,500 to 2,000; (B) A SESSION IN THE EVENTS PROGRAMME, a workshop or other session once during the three-month run, around 2.5 to 4 hours, fee EUR 2,000 to 2,500; (C) AN (ART)WORK FOR THE EXHIBITION, existing work in any format (installation, sculpture, zine stand, a corner of your own) sturdy enough for a public area with daily traffic, honorarium EUR 200 to 400 including licensing and production; (D) SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY, pitch it anyway. WHO: artists, designers, researchers, technologists, performers, musicians, archivists, or educators working around AI, data, libraries, or cultural heritage; no finished idea or polished CV needed, just a clear, specific pitch. You can be based anywhere and they especially welcome people outside the Netherlands; the show is in-person in The Hague and the fee stays the same wherever you are coming from. HOW TO APPLY: send a short pitch through the form (which track, your idea in a paragraph or two, roughly what it would need, and a link to your work); takes about five minutes, no full application required. Deadline: end of August 2026. Questions to hello@aixdesign.co.
The Digital Democracy Centre (DDC) at the University of Southern Denmark, with support from TrygFonden, is calling for applications for its 2027 fellowship cohort. The program fosters collaboration between researchers, journalists, and policymakers exploring the impact of digital technology and AI on media, politics, and democracy. Fellows collaborate with a self-selected DDC mentor to generate new knowledge, contribute to public debate, develop networks, and produce tangible outreach outputs such as policy briefs, educational packages, and talks. THREE FELLOWSHIP TYPES: (1) academic fellows researching digital technologies and democracy; (2) journalist fellows covering digital technology and democracy; (3) policy fellows contributing to the regulatory debate. Target group: researchers, journalism graduates, and policymakers in research/educational institutions, media organizations, ministries, NGOs, etc. PRIORITIES: projects with clear relevance to Denmark or Danish society (including comparative/international projects yielding insights relevant to a Danish context); in 2027, projects related to DDC's Hybrid Warfare Initiative (societal resilience to new forms of international conflict, with a focus on digital technologies and AI) are also prioritized. EXPECTATIONS: applicants must secure confirmation of mentorship from their desired DDC mentor BEFORE applying (applications without a confirmed mentor are automatically rejected; PhD students and research assistants are generally not eligible as mentors, and Sten Schaumburg-Muller is unavailable as a mentor for the 2027 call); applicants must also coordinate support from their current supervisors/managers. Fellows engage in DDC activities, seminars/workshops, and public outreach, and submit a short report within two months of finishing. APPLICATION (in English): preliminary project title, fellowship type, brief project description (max 1000 chars), detailed description and timeline (max 2400 chars, including duration, confirmed mentor, and remote/in-office work plan), description of activities and collaboration with external practice partners (max 1000 chars), expected product/impact/output (max 500 chars), a CV (max 5 pages), and an overview of the posts for which financial support is sought. Submit the application form (PDF or Word) plus CV as PDFs to ddc@sdu.dk with subject line 'DDC / TrygFonden Fellowship application'. Deadline 1 September 2026; decisions communicated no later than 1 October 2026.
Since 2020 the Prototype Fund Switzerland has strengthened the common good with open-source, public-interest technology, supporting interdisciplinary teams to develop and test early-stage projects that show how open source, data and digital technologies such as AI can create real societal value. The 2026-2027 edition focuses on Responsible and Sustainable AI: building the path toward a more responsible and sustainable AI, tech and digitalization landscape, open source and beyond. THIS YEAR'S FOCUS: projects that reduce resource use, energy consumption or emissions; strengthen accountability, transparency and governance; and contribute to resilient and trustworthy digital systems, including sustainable digitalization and digital sufficiency, public-interest AI and data infrastructures, and tools for governance, oversight or digital sovereignty. PUBLIC INTEREST TECH areas span sustainability and climate, participation and civic tech, education and literacy, health and inclusion, and open knowledge and data. WHO THEY FUND: individuals and small teams open to open source, AI and iterative experimentation, eager to combine technical capability with societal and political awareness, willing to share learnings, motivated to work on pressing societal problems through technology, with an early-stage but well-thought-out concept, and eligible to work in Switzerland. SUPPORT: up to CHF 50,000 in funding, a 4-month prototyping phase, coaching, mentoring and workshops, and access to a strong network across tech, policy and society. Teams are strongly encouraged (though not required) to publish code, data or components under open-source licenses and to document their approach. TIMELINE: applications 21 July to 7 September 2026; rolling jury selection August-September 2026; prototyping mid-October 2026 to mid-February 2027; outputs and learnings November 2026 to July 2027. Questions: info@prototypefund.ch.
Híbrides is a biennial of artistic research co-organised by the Axolot.cat collective and the DARTS (Design, Art, Technology and Society) research group at the UOC in Barcelona. The second edition, "Small Embodied Data," centres on the concept of classification -- approached through machine learning, data science, algorithmic systems, and questions of who designs classifiers, under what ethical codes, and to what end. The biennial brings classification into dialogue with its previous themes of Small Data (community-defined, intentional data collection and analysis) and Embodiment (bodily experience as a foundation of situated, sensory knowledge). Both academic and non-academic contributions are welcome. FORMATS ACCEPTED: Oral Presentations (20 minutes; artistic practice, artistic research, or academic research projects; may be video-recorded for a public archive and developed into short papers); Performances (20-30 minutes; must engage with the physical body, stage, and technology; complete works, including previously presented work; takes place in a multipurpose space with technical support). SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS: online form with abstract (max 1,000 characters), professional biography (max 1,000 characters), and link to representative materials (3-5 images; video and technical rider required for performances). HONORARIA: oral presentations €100; performances €400; invoice required in both cases. Participants must follow the event's code of conduct. Event runs 26-28 November 2026 at UOC Poblenou campus and Convent de Sant Agustí, Barcelona. Deadline: 7 September 2026. Submit at https://hibrides.axolot.cat/opencall.html.
Horizon Europe Cluster 2 funds research on culture, creativity, and inclusive society. The 2026 call (HORIZON-CL2-2026-01-HERITAGE, launched May 12, 2026) covers 7 topics with an indicative budget of €85.5 million. Topic HERITAGE-04 is explicitly titled 'Towards a fair and transparent market for cultural and creative content in the era of generative AI,' covering: impacts of generative AI on creative industries employment; upskilling needs for creative workers; policy and regulatory frameworks; fair remuneration and transparency. Highly relevant for research into AI and cultural/creative industries, artists' rights in the AI era, and sociotechnical studies of AI and culture. ELIGIBILITY: consortium-based applications (minimum 3 organisations from 3 different EU/associated countries are typical for Horizon RIA grants; check call conditions on the Funding & Tenders portal for specific requirements). Deadline: 23 September 2026. Apply via the EU Funding & Tenders portal (ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders).
Call for short films (1-10 minutes) involving human/AI hybrid creation, from the We Are Human Foundation in Paris. Three cash awards: Grand Prix EUR 5,000, Best Screenplay EUR 3,000, and an Ethics Award EUR 2,000. ELIGIBILITY: international, applicants 18+; films must have been completed after 1 June 2025 and involve human/AI hybrid creation; a mandatory Ethics Notebook accompanies each submission. No submission fee. Festival screening at Forum des images, Paris, on 24 November 2026. Apply via FilmFreeway; deadline 30 September 2026.
Waag Futurelab invites artists, theatre makers, choreographers, dancers, game designers and other creative practitioners to engage directly with seven experimental generative AI Enablers being co-created with technologists and dance, theatre and gaming professionals. The call is an invitation into the development process: selected artists get access to the technologies, datasets, interfaces and assumptions that shape these systems while they are still being built. Rather than testing whether the systems work, artists are asked to interrogate why they work the way they do, who they are designed for, what forms of creativity they enable or constrain, and what assumptions about culture, intelligence, authorship, labour, bodies, audiences and society are embedded in them. Waag is looking for individuals and collectives willing to move beyond adoption into investigation, and welcomes proposals that are speculative, critical, poetic, provocative, humorous, performative, constructive or disruptive, including work that challenges, misuses, reimagines, hacks, subverts or plays with the tools, exposes hidden biases, questions environmental costs, or imagines alternative technological futures. THE SEVEN AI ENABLERS, each requiring an on-site visit to its technology partner: the Generic Procedural Content Generation Enabler (text-to-3D assets and avatars, CERTH, Greece); the Data-Driven Cultural Content Adaptation Enabler (audience-aware creative content ideation with ranked candidate ideas, CERTH, Greece); the Cross-Domain Audience Engagement Analytics Enabler (turning heterogeneous cultural participation data into interpretable engagement signals, The Audience Agency, Warrington, UK); the Dance Style Analysis and Generation Enabler (dance video into virtual 3D choreography, dissected into body, effort, shape and space components, Centre of Excellence for Research & Innovation, Cyprus); the Immersive Design Integration Enabler for Dance & Theatre (NLP-driven XR environments with speech-to-3D scene editing, Cyprus); the Music-to-Movement Translation Enabler (audio into a time-aligned feature set spanning genre classification, emotional valence-arousal analysis, rhythm extraction and latent-space projection, feeding motion generation, spatial audio and visual choreography, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece); and the Adaptive Narrative Enabler for Games & Theatre (an evolutionary AI trained on creator-written story elements that generates infinite story variations, explicitly rejecting LLMs because of their dependence on copyrighted or public-domain corpora that encode 19th and early 20th century sexism, racism and imperialism, CAUSA Creation, Austria). ELIGIBILITY: artists, designers, creative technologists, theatre makers, dancers, choreographers and game designers, as individuals or collectives; applicants must hold a European VAT number. An info session with live demonstrations of the AI Enablers runs 31 July 2026, 10:00 to 11:30 CEST (meeting ID 995 7016 2341). Applications go through Homerun using the official Application Template, uploaded as a PDF; read the Guide for Applicants, which contains the full Enabler descriptions, before applying. Questions: zoenie at waag dot org. The AI Enablers and this call are part of the Horizon Europe project HAMLET, which aims to make generative AI accessible to cultural organisations of all sizes. Closes 30 September 2026, 23:59 CEST. Free to apply.
The microagi Research Fellowship (Cohort 01) provides researchers with frontier-lab resources and the freedom to work on hard problems in robotics, embodied AI, and the systems around them. Fellows work in residence for six months at microagi's offices in Munich or Zurich. AMOUNT: up to $2,000,000 in compute; $10,000/month stipend. RESEARCH AREAS: (1) Long Horizon Dexterous Manipulation -- end-to-end models for complex multi-stage tasks with dexterous hands, natural language instruction following, memory across long task sequences, fine-grained physical control in unstructured environments; (2) Cross Embodiment Learning; (3) On Device Physical Intelligence; (4) Safe and Reliable Deployment. microagi's model is to deploy embodied intelligence into physical-world operations and turn what it learns there into compounding research. REFERRAL: $10,000 bonus for referring a candidate who is accepted into the cohort. No application deadline publicly stated as of June 2026 -- one cohort only, apply as soon as possible via https://www.microagi.ai/fellowship.