Currently 14 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.
Subscribe: RSS feed · Calendar (.ics)
The ETH AI Center's flagship fellowship programme funds doctoral and postdoctoral researchers doing interdisciplinary AI research, either within AI foundations or between AI foundations and application areas, including safe and trustworthy AI. Fellows are co-supervised across ETH groups and join the AI Center's community. ELIGIBILITY: doctoral track needs a Master's in computer science, machine learning, statistics, physics, engineering, applied mathematics or a related field, completed by June 2027; postdoc track needs a PhD completed by June 2027. Two to three reference letters are required. Selection weighs research excellence, interdisciplinary collaboration and impact orientation. APPLICATION: separate portals for the doctoral and postdoc tracks (linked from the programme page); deadline 27 October 2026 at 16:00 CET. Related CLS and ELLIS PhD tracks have their own applications.
First edition of an international call for artists under 35 working with artificial intelligence, digital languages and emerging technologies, run by 360° Creativity Events APS for PARMA 360 Festival and Parma European Youth Capital 2027. It follows the 2026 pilot exhibition SYNTHETIC HORIZONS (curated by Chiara Canali). The call focuses on open-source and closed-source image and video generation tools and their creative, social and cultural impact. THEMES: Parma Heritage (crafts, traditions, archives, immersive storytelling of the city); La Cura / Care (wellbeing, accessibility, AI ethics, health tech, public space); Sustainability and Data Ecology (energy and water cost of AI, data extraction and digital colonialism, waste of digital images, ethics of automated production). ACCEPTED FORMATS: digital and synthetic images, NFTs, printed digital photography, digital/3D-printed sculpture, video, audio, interactive browser or chatbot installations, software art, VR, AR, sound art, performance and hybrids. Works must already be completed but need not be unpublished. One application per artist. REQUIRED: an Artist Statement (max 1,500 characters) on how you use AI, naming software, models and workflow; missing statements are excluded. SELECTION: a jury of the PARMA 360 artistic direction, the Parma EYC27 committee and AI/new-tech experts picks 20 finalists (at least 3 from the Parma area), announced from 1 December 2026; finalists show in a group exhibition curated by Chiara Canali in Parma in April-May 2027. The organiser covers shipping to the show and AV equipment hire and gives finalists one hotel night at the opening; return shipping and travel are at the artist's cost. Prize-winning works are acquired in full or in part. AGE: must not have turned 35 by the closing date. DEADLINE: 31 October 2026, midnight Rome time, via the Google Form linked in the call. Questions: aihorizonscall@gmail.com.
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.
First visiting-fellow cohort of the newly launched KU Leuven AI Safety Lab, a multidisciplinary research group on large-scale risks of advanced AI (independent research, policy workshops, a summer school and an annual conference). Five fellows spend March to May 2027 in Leuven under two programmes: Theories of Victory and Viable Endgames (positive AI futures and the conditions for beneficial advanced AI outcomes) and Democratic Control over AI Companies (power concentration and mechanisms for societal oversight of frontier AI developers); strong AI safety proposals outside these two areas are also considered. ELIGIBILITY: PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers, faculty and researchers outside academia, from any relevant discipline; applications from underrepresented groups encouraged. APPLICATION: email a CV (max 2 pages including publications), a one-page cover letter and a research plan (max 1,500 words) to existentialrisk@kuleuven.be with subject line 'Fellowship application' plus the programme name. Deadline 31 October 2026.
Foresight Institute's AI for Science and Safety Nodes request for proposals funds open, AI-first projects across three calls: I. Local Compute (compute that individuals and communities physically own and control), II. Coordination and Accountability (supercollaboration and decentralised alignment, human empowerment, and AI insurance and open governance: multi-agent oversight and verification, tools for collective deliberation, decision rules for when human control adds value, and independent risk assessment or insurance mechanisms for frontier labs), and III. AI-first Science (automated nanotechnology, whole-brain emulation, frontier bio). Grantees can also get workspace in the San Francisco or Berlin AI Nodes (a community xNode runs in Cape Town) and private compute. All funded code, data and outputs must be open-sourced. Projects are judged on fit with the focus area, impact on reducing existential risk from AI, feasibility within 1 to 3 years, AI-first working methods, ability to execute, and high-risk, high-reward potential. ELIGIBILITY: individuals, teams and organisations worldwide; nonprofits and for-profits welcome (for-profits must justify the need for grant funding). Priority goes to applicants who want to work in person at one of the Nodes, but it is not required. Review takes about three months; applications can opt in to sharing with Lightcone Commons. DEADLINE: 31 October 2026, 23:59 PDT.
Bellingcat, the open source investigations collective, is hiring a contractor AI engineer to build agentic systems that support its investigators. (Listed on Grant Desk as an exception to the no-jobs rule: a remote, paid, public-interest AI contract.) THE ROLE: build, test, deploy and monitor multi-agent workflows for open source investigations; develop agentic pipelines with human oversight, feedback loops and evaluation metrics; architect and maintain cloud infrastructure for hosting LLM harnesses and monitoring agents using token-as-a-service providers; develop MCP servers and data bridges connecting agents to open source research tools and databases; and create evaluation frameworks for the performance and reasoning of agentic pipelines. WHAT YOU GET: an annual fee of USD 80,000 to 93,000 for full-time work (part-time 20 hours/week also possible), on an initial 12-month contract, working remotely with some flexibility to work from other countries for a limited number of weeks per year. ELIGIBILITY: hands-on full-stack development experience including infrastructure maintenance and server-side data workflows; experience with agentic AI workflows and open-source harnesses; experience with human-in-the-loop design (approval checks, feedback loops); a collaborative record of working with non-technical colleagues on public interest technology; English proficiency; and a time zone overlapping with Europe. Experience with mission-driven organisations or open source / public interest tech is a plus. APPLICATION: via Google Form; Bellingcat asks that applications not be AI-generated (AI for grammar checks is fine). Review is rolling from 21 October and interviews may start before the close. DEADLINE: 8 November 2026.
Realities in Transition (RiT2), a Creative Europe XR cooperation project, and Beta Festival in Ireland invite artists, technologists, storytellers, engineers, hackers and designers to develop XR, interactive, multi-user work that explores technology through relationships between human, artificial and more-than-human intelligence, with a focus on decolonial thinking and interdependence. Three artists are selected, each paired with a creative technologist and working as a group. WHAT YOU GET: a EUR 15,000 grant per artist for a six-month hybrid residency from March to August 2027, with an in-person period at Beta in May to June 2027, a Test Lab in June 2027 and a showcase at Beta Festival in November 2027. APPLICATION: online form linked from the call page; see the RiT residencies page for eligibility. DEADLINE: 10 November 2026, 23:59 CEST.
The MEDIA strand's Innovative Tools and Business Models call (CREA-MEDIA-2027-INNOVBUSMOD) funds tools and business models that strengthen the competitiveness of the European audiovisual and video games industries. WHAT IT FUNDS: tools for subtitling, accessibility, discoverability and recommendation; automated rights management and data analytics; business models linking festivals, cinemas and VOD; new modes of production, financing or distribution using AI, big data, blockchain, virtual worlds or NFTs; and greening the audiovisual and video games industry. WHO: a single organisation or a consortium of two or more, established in a MEDIA country; individuals cannot apply. WHAT YOU GET: grants at an 80 percent funding rate from a total budget of EUR 14,000,000. APPLICATION: via the EU Funding and Tenders portal. DEADLINE: 14 January 2027, 17:00 CET (Brussels).
HIIG's Impact AI Fellowship invites people interested in measuring the effects of AI on society and the environment to assess an existing, operational AI application and take lead authorship of a published case report. Applicants do not need their own case; HIIG helps match fellows with cases, and proposed cases must be deployed applications rather than prototypes or research ideas. WHO: holders of a master's degree; field experience is an advantage but an academic track record is not required. FORMAT: ten weeks from 16 August to 22 October 2027, with mandatory in-person weeks in Berlin (16-20 August and 4-8 October 2027), an independent research phase that can be done remotely, regular online check-ins, and a mandatory online preparatory session on 11 May 2027. WHAT YOU GET: a fixed EUR 5,000 stipend and case-by-case partial support for in-person costs; health insurance, visa and meals are the fellow's responsibility. APPLICATION: online form with one combined file (CV up to 4 pages, motivation letter up to 2 pages, optional project description up to 2 pages). Info sessions on 10 November 2026 (10:00) and 17 November 2026 (15:00). DEADLINE: 15 January 2027.
The Creative Innovation Lab (call CREA-CROSS-2027-INNOVLAB) funds innovative tools, models and solutions applicable across the audiovisual and other cultural and creative sectors. Every project must involve the audiovisual sector (video games included) plus at least one of music, books or museums. The 2027 call is explicitly aligned with the EU Apply AI Strategy, including AI for content discoverability, and covers virtual worlds, AI-, data- and blockchain-based business tools (rights management, monetisation, data analytics) and greener practices. WHO: a single organisation or a consortium of two or more, established in a Creative Europe country; individuals cannot apply. WHAT YOU GET: an actual-cost grant at an 80 percent funding rate from a total budget of EUR 7,183,502, with financial support to third parties of up to EUR 60,000 each allowed. APPLICATION: via the EU Funding and Tenders portal. DEADLINE: 22 April 2027, 17:00 CET (Brussels).
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.