Currently 8 active ai and ai safety grants, fellowships and residencies open to applicants in the UK. 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 MATS Residency, announced in August 2026 as a new track alongside the seasonal MATS fellowship, funds 6 to 24 months of high-independence AI safety research for experienced researchers, whether already in AI safety or moving in from adjacent fields. COMPENSATION: USD 155,000 to 285,000 per year gross depending on location, seniority and experience, plus insurance, retirement plan, PTO (17 days US / 20 days UK), conference funding, catered meals, and up to USD 25,000 in relocation support. ELIGIBILITY: at least one substantial piece of research-caliber work; credentials are not required. Full-time (part-time case by case for academics on sabbatical), in person at MATS offices in Berkeley, London, or Washington DC, with visa support where required. TIMELINE: the Winter 2027 intake window runs 25 August to 31 October 2026 (AoE), with decisions by end of November and interviews plus a paid work test in the first week of December; three intake windows per year.
Fully funded, full-time, in-person research fellowship in London for anyone 18 or over committed to ensuring AI develops safely. Fellows work on a project with an established mentor, with weekly 1-on-1s, dedicated research-management support and co-working at LISA. Past projects span AI governance, technical AI safety and technical AI governance. Among this round's projects, Risto Uuk and a co-mentor are supervising a fellow on EU AI governance, looking for someone curious and motivated with experience or interest in policy or law. Other mentors include Patrick Levermore, Alexandra Abbas, Caspar Kaiser, Cecilia Elena Tilli, Connor Dunlop, Daniel Tan and Dave Banerjee; the full list is on the fellowship page.
BRAID, the UKRI AHRC-funded Responsible AI programme at the University of Edinburgh, is commissioning around seven creative works that treat Responsible AI as a question of relationships, commitments and obligations rather than a technical checklist or a set of rules, under the title A Promise in Return. WHO: UK-based creative practitioners in any medium: artists, designers, musicians and performers, architects and urban designers, craftspeople and artisans, writers and poets. Full-time undergraduate and taught postgraduate students are not eligible; PhD students may apply if registered as self-employed freelancers. WHAT YOU GET: a commission budget of GBP 8,000 to 12,000, production support from Inspace and the Institute for Design Informatics, and presentation during the Edinburgh Art Festival in August 2027 with the Edinburgh Futures Institute. APPLICATION: online form (written or an eight-minute video application) plus a single PDF of portfolio, CV and budget emailed to braid@ed.ac.uk; late submissions are not accepted. DEADLINE: Monday 2 November 2026 at 17:00 GMT.
A year-long fellowship for journalists covering artificial intelligence. Fellows complete a three-month full-time remote programme on AI and journalism fundamentals, attend a weeklong summit, then work for nine months as reporters embedded in a partner newsroom (current partners are in Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC and Cambridge). ELIGIBILITY: journalism or AI expertise, aged 18+ by 7 June 2027, no degree required; primarily for applicants with the right to work in the US, UK or Hong Kong, as visa sponsorship is uncommon and needs partner-outlet approval.
AIXI Labs is a small London-based non-profit doing AI safety research grounded in algorithmic information theory. Its stated position is that most AI research today is either mathematically clean but narrow, or practical but too opaque for rigorous safety analysis; the lab targets a third category, methods general enough to describe powerful agents and provable enough to support real safety claims, using AIXI (the theoretical model of unbounded artificial superintelligence) and then porting the strongest of those ideas to modern LLM-based agents. The fellowship is a quarterly, rolling programme for researchers who want to work on this agenda under close mentorship from the core team: Cole Wyeth (Founder and Executive Director), Marcus Hutter (Research Director) and Aram Ebtekar (Founding Research Scientist). Fellows pursue a focused research project over roughly a quarter and receive a monthly stipend plus a compute budget for machine-learning work. The fellowship is fully remote, so fellows may work from anywhere in the world or from the London base. RESPONSIBILITIES: pursue a self-directed research project aligned with the lab's algorithmic-information-theoretic approach to AI safety, spanning anything from foundational theory to empirical tests with LLM-based agents; shape the project direction around your own strengths and interests, as the lab supports a range of work within this framework; and contribute papers, blog posts or other written output communicating results to the broader AI safety and ML research communities. MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS: a research background at the level of a current PhD student (for primarily empirical projects, a master's-level command of the relevant mathematics paired with substantial industry or applied research experience can also qualify); solid grounding in probability, statistics, information theory and reinforcement learning, sufficient to engage seriously with AIXI-style theoretical models (prior expertise in algorithmic information theory or AIXI is NOT required); strong verbal and written communication skills; genuine motivation to reduce existential risk from advanced AI and enthusiasm for the lab's kind of work. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS: publications at top ML, AI or theory venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ALT or COLT, though the lab values the strength of your best work over volume; background in algorithmic information theory, computability theory, learning theory or related theoretical computer science; experience fine-tuning, evaluating or red-teaming LLM-based and/or RL agents; prior engagement with the UAI/AIXI community or related fields, including members of the lab's online reading groups. APPLICATIONS are reviewed on a rolling basis and previous applicants remain eligible for later rounds.
The ILIAD Intensive is a four-week, full-time, in-person program for mathematically strong researchers interested in foundational AI alignment, running in London (at LISA) and in Berkeley. It runs five days a week, 10am to 6pm, in cohorts of 15 to 30 participants. CURRICULUM, across five clusters: Alignment (decomposing the alignment problem, pretraining, post-training and deployment, reward learning); Learning (deep learning theory, singular learning theory, training dynamics); Abstractions, Representations and Interpretability (mechanistic interpretability, natural latents); Agency (reinforcement learning, decision theory, agent foundations); and Safety Guarantees (debate, steganography, the limits of interpretability). MONEY: no tuition is charged. Each participant receives a USD 5,000 travel and housing allowance, office space at the venue, and lunch and dinner five days a week. Participants book and pay for their own travel and accommodation out of the allowance. ELIGIBILITY: a strong mathematical background, typically graduate-level study or a completed degree in mathematics, physics or theoretical computer science, though mathematical maturity is weighted more heavily than specific credentials. Research experience, general competence and motivation are also assessed. Prior machine learning or alignment experience is not required. DEADLINE: no fixed closing date is published. A single application covers several upcoming programs and applicants indicate their preferred dates and locations; applications are being accepted for the October 2026 and November 2026 cohorts. HOW TO APPLY: through the application portal at iliad.ac/apply. Questions to contact@iliad.ac.
The Anthropic Fellows Program is a four-month, fully funded research fellowship with direct mentorship from Anthropic researchers. Fellows work on empirical projects aligned with Anthropic's research priorities using external infrastructure, aiming to produce public outputs such as papers. Five workstreams: AI Safety, AI Security, ML Systems and Performance, Reinforcement Learning, and Economics and Policy; safety topics include scalable oversight, adversarial robustness, mechanistic interpretability, and model organisms. FUNDING: a weekly stipend of USD 3,850 (GBP 2,310 / CAD 4,300), around USD 15,000 per month in compute funding, and other research expenses. ELIGIBILITY: fluent Python; available full-time for four months; strong technical background in computer science, mathematics, or physics; work authorization in the US, UK, or Canada (no visa sponsorship). Locations: San Francisco, London, Ontario, or remote within those countries. APPLICATION: rolling, via the Constellation portal; the process includes an initial application, reference checks, technical assessments, interviews, and a research discussion. The next cohort is expected to start in January 2027, so apply well before the end of 2026.
Mentored, individual research in applied mathematics for AI alignment, including foundational questions that get less attention elsewhere, drawing on mathematics, theoretical physics and computer science. ELIGIBILITY: designed for PhD students, postdocs and researchers with equivalent experience in mathematics, theoretical physics, computer science or related fields; selection weighs academic credentials, technical ability, intentions and fit with the cohort's research coverage. APPLICATION: rolling, with fellowships starting at the beginning of most months.