Currently 9 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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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).
Fully funded four-year PhD position (third-cycle subject: Information and Communication Technology) on Feminist AI Addressing Gender-Based Violence, supervised by Associate Professor Amir Hossein Payberah at the Department of Computing and Learning Systems. The project develops AI methods that make online gender-based violence visible by detecting not only explicit abuse but also the structural silences and omissions that shape digital narratives, combining large language models, NLP and machine learning to identify missing voices, hidden patterns and gaps in institutional accountability. The doctoral student will develop novel ML models and evaluation methods, construct large-scale datasets and knowledge graphs, collaborate with feminist organizations and civil society partners, and publish in leading AI venues. ELIGIBILITY: a second-cycle (master's) degree, or at least 240 higher education credits including 60 second-cycle credits, or substantially equivalent knowledge, plus English equivalent to Swedish English B/6. APPLY via KTH's recruitment system (reference number PA-2026-2872) with certified copies of diplomas and grades, CV, an application letter of maximum 2 pages, representative publications or technical reports, and contact details for two to three academic references. Deadline 24 September 2026 at midnight CEST.
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.
Umbrella request for proposals for ambitious AI-first projects that make the transition to capable AI go well and use it to unlock science. Three connected layers, each with its own detailed call: I. Local Compute (compute that individuals or communities physically own and control); II. Coordination and Accountability (supercollaboration and decentralized alignment, human empowerment, AI insurance and open governance); III. AI-First Science: Bio, Neuro, Nano (automated nanotechnology, whole-brain emulation, replacement, enhancement, biostasis). AI-first means AI is the primary engine of progress, not tapped onto an existing research program; strong proposals identify narrow bottlenecks and propose something that can be built, tested or measured. Selected projects receive grant funding, private local compute, workspace at the San Francisco or Berlin AI Nodes, travel-paid field-building events and access to Foresight's advisors and scientific network. ELIGIBILITY: individuals, teams, and nonprofit or for-profit organisations worldwide (for-profits must justify their need for grant funding); applicants who want to be active in-person contributors at the Nodes are strongly prioritised. Grants typically $30,000 to $100,000, smaller for the Human Empowerment and AI Insurance & Open Governance areas and higher for the rest. Review takes about three months after the deadline. Deadline 31 October 2026, 23:59 PDT.
Track I of Foresight Institute's AI for Science & Safety Nodes RFP funds building and scaling local compute setups that individuals or communities physically own and control. With five companies holding 71 percent of the world's AI compute, researchers relying on APIs and rented compute face data exposure, steep price increases and the risk of losing access altogether; open models are ready for serious science and safety work, but the ecosystem lacks sovereign and secure compute infrastructure. LOOKING FOR: local compute clusters in different sizes and configurations that are easy to set up and run across varied connectivity and electricity environments; blueprints for easy yet secure cluster management; models for bringing down cost, like selling idle compute or connecting to community clusters; ideally a business case for building, selling and distributing such clusters at scale. EXAMPLE DELIVERABLES: a prototype AI cluster an average person can deploy at home, software that runs a node without expert knowledge, economic models showing how the hardware pays for itself, a pilot deployment for individuals or communities. Selected projects receive grant funding, private local compute, workspace at the San Francisco or Berlin AI Nodes, travel-paid field-building events and access to Foresight's advisors and network; in-person contributors at the Nodes are strongly prioritised. Individuals, teams, and nonprofit or for-profit organisations worldwide may apply (for-profits must justify their need for grant funding). Deadline 31 October 2026, 23:59 PDT.
Track II of Foresight Institute's AI for Science & Safety Nodes RFP funds ways for increasingly capable AI systems to coordinate with each other, the people using them, and the wider world, without handing power to a single model, lab or government. THREE FOCUS AREAS: (1) Supercollaboration and decentralized alignment: coordination and credit-assignment protocols, tooling for massive human-AI collectives, incentive designs robust to gaming, mutual monitoring and cross-checking among agents, scalable verification, and open coordination protocols built on boundaries as Schelling points for multi-agent coordination. (2) Human Empowerment: evidence, decision rules and working tools for when human control genuinely empowers people versus when AI delegation is preferable, including a 'when to defer control' framework and mechanisms to detect and fix hollow oversight. (3) AI Insurance and Open Governance: building a middle layer between lab self-governance and government regulation, such as ways for insurers to judge and price frontier-lab risk, independent incident reporting and assessment that does not leak lab secrets, and mechanisms like developer mutuals, catastrophe bonds or liability for near-misses. Selected projects receive grant funding, private local compute, workspace at the San Francisco or Berlin AI Nodes, travel-paid field-building events and access to Foresight's advisors and network; in-person contributors at the Nodes are strongly prioritised. Individuals, teams, and nonprofit or for-profit organisations worldwide may apply (for-profits must justify their need for grant funding). Deadline 31 October 2026, 23:59 PDT.
Track III of Foresight Institute's AI for Science & Safety Nodes RFP funds AI-first science in bio, neuro and nano: work that asks what important science is stuck, what it is actually stuck on, and whether we can build the thing that removes that constraint. THREE FOCUS AREAS: (1) Automated nanotechnology: AI methods for nanoscale design, simulation and assembly, closed-loop fabrication and characterization tools, credible application pathways from toy problems to medicine, environment and bottom-up production, and defensive applications and safety frameworks. (2) Whole-brain emulation: cheaper and faster brain mapping and preservation, bringing down the cost of connectomics through better imaging or cheaper proofreading, lo-fi emulation pathways that predict organism behavior from behavioral and neural data, and shorter experimental feedback loops in neurobiology. (3) Replacement, Enhancement, Biostasis: longevity work including tissue engineering, organ synthesis, 3D bioprinting and progressive replacement strategies; reversible biostasis for organs and full humans with improved preservation and revival protocols and organ banking; and datasets for independently testing genetic predictors, gene editing and better measures of aging. Selected projects receive grant funding, private local compute, workspace at the San Francisco or Berlin AI Nodes, travel-paid field-building events and access to Foresight's advisors and network; in-person contributors at the Nodes are strongly prioritised. Individuals, teams, and nonprofit or for-profit organisations worldwide may apply (for-profits must justify their need for grant funding). Deadline 31 October 2026, 23:59 PDT.
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.