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AI and AI Safety Grants in the Netherlands

Currently 5 active ai and ai safety grants, fellowships and residencies open to applicants in the Netherlands. 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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Open calls

  1. University of Twente: Postdoc, Multimodal Conversational AI for Cultural Heritage

    University of Twente, Human Media Interaction group · Enschede, Netherlands · Deadline: 16 Aug 2026 · Award: EUR 3,546 to 5,538 gross per month for 40 hours per week (8 salary steps, depending on experience), plus standard Dutch university holiday and year-end allowances.

    A postdoctoral position in the Human Media Interaction group at the University of Twente on the project 'Balancing Personalisation and Polyvocality: Dialogic Interaction for Open-mindedness and Empathy in Conversational AI'. The work develops and evaluates multimodal conversational agents for museum settings that hold personalisation in tension with exposure to plural perspectives, rather than optimising for engagement alone. Tasks include building models that use gaze, speech and dialogue data to infer visitor engagement and openness, designing adaptive dialogue strategies, running VR-based user studies, and publishing in strong venues. Of the current Dutch academic postings this is the closest thing to a funded creative-technologist brief: museum interpretation, multimodal sensing and dialogue design in one role. REQUIREMENTS: a PhD in computer science, AI, HCI or a related field; experience with conversational AI, dialogue systems or adaptive systems; experience running empirical research, preferably user studies; strong analytical and academic writing skills; and excellent English. Apply with a CV including publications, a motivation letter and two academic references. Contact: Shenghui Wang (shenghui.wang@utwente.nl). NOTE: the AcademicTransfer listing page shows a 16 August 2026 deadline while the detail page states 17 August 2026, so treat 16 August as the effective cut-off.

  2. University of Twente: Postdoc, Ethics and Epistemology of LLMs4EU (17 months)

    University of Twente, Philosophy section / 4TU.Center for Ethics and Technology · Enschede, Netherlands · Deadline: 25 Aug 2026 · Award: EUR 4,241 to 5,538 gross per month (scale 10, steps 4 to 12) at 1.0 FTE, plus 8 percent holiday allowance and an 8.3 percent year-end bonus.

    A postdoctoral position in the Philosophy section at the University of Twente, part of the 4TU.Center for Ethics and Technology, working on the ethics and epistemology strand (Work Package 6) of LLMs4EU. LLMs4EU is a European Commission funded initiative led by the Alliance for Language Technologies, spanning more than 20 countries, to build large language models across all EU languages and preserve European linguistic and cultural diversity in the digital age while keeping the resulting tools compliant with European values and legislation including the AI Act and the GDPR. TASKS: establish benchmarking frameworks that address legal and ethical concerns; develop guidelines for fine-tuning processes with an emphasis on preserving cultural heritage; oversee ethics compliance and advise the project ethics board; and build frameworks that integrate ethical considerations into LLM design. This is the tech-communication and language-politics end of AI research rather than a modelling job: the questions are whose language, whose culture and whose norms get encoded when a continent builds its own models. REQUIREMENTS: a doctorate in ethics, philosophy, science and technology studies, AI ethics, computer science with an ethics focus, or a related field; demonstrated expertise in AI ethics and ethics compliance; understanding of AI tool design and LLM development; appreciation for cultural diversity; strong communication and organisational skills; and professional English. Apply through the AcademicTransfer posting. Closes 25 August 2026.

  3. Human Rights Watch: AI Strategy and Solutions Lead (one-year fixed term)

    Human Rights Watch (HRW), Operations Department · Must be within commuting distance of an HRW office: Amsterdam, Amman, Berlin, Brussels, London, Stockholm, New York, Washington DC, Miami, Sao Paulo, Toronto or Chicago. Reports to the Chief Information Officer in Berlin. No relocation support and no work-authorisation sponsorship. · Deadline: 30 Aug 2026 · Award: USD 102,000 to 112,000 plus employer-paid benefits if based in the US; ranges outside the US are set by local market conditions. No application fee.

    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.

  4. AIxDESIGN x KB: Open Call for Sessions, (Art)works and Performances

    AIxDESIGN, co-presented with the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), National Library of the Netherlands · KB, The Hague, Netherlands (in-person exhibition and programme); pitches welcome from people based anywhere · Deadline: 31 Aug 2026 · Award: Fees by track: opening-night experience EUR 1,500 to 2,000; a session in the events programme EUR 2,000 to 2,500; an existing (art)work for the exhibition EUR 200 to 400 honorarium (including licensing and production). The fee stays the same wherever you are based.

    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.

  5. Trust me, I'm an AI/rtist: Open Call for Creative Interventions

    Waag Futurelab (Horizon Europe project HAMLET) · Europe. Engaging with a specific AI Enabler includes an on-site visit to its technology partner: CERTH (Greece), The Audience Agency (Warrington, UK), the Centre of Excellence for Research & Innovation (Cyprus), Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), or CAUSA Creation (Austria). Final presentations September 2027. · Deadline: 30 Sep 2026 · Award: EUR 20,000 commission fee excluding VAT, inclusive of artist fee, travel, accommodation and production costs. Applicants must have a VAT number in Europe. No application fee.

    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.

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