Currently 10 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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Paid in-person research fellowship in Cambridge for people who want to build expertise in AI safety or AI governance. Fellows develop and complete a research project on mitigating risks from frontier AI, working in one of three streams: technical safety, governance, or technical AI governance. WHAT YOU GET: a GBP 10,000 stipend for the 10-week programme, visa support, travel expense coverage, meals during working hours, expert mentorship from established researchers, dedicated research management support aimed at publishing in top venues, and immersion in Cambridge's AI safety research community with regular social and networking events. Top performers can be extended by 6 months or more through the Research Scholars programme. ELIGIBILITY: open to anyone 18 or older; the programme is talent-first with no formal credential requirement, welcoming researchers, students and professionals from technical, policy, security, legal, economic and other relevant backgrounds; prior formal research experience is not required. SELECTION: three stages, a written application of roughly 2 hours, Round 1 interviews in late September for the top 20 percent, and Round 2 interviews in early October. COHORT: starts 18 January 2027. Deadline 13 September 2026 at 23:59 Anywhere on Earth.
The British Open-ended Learning and Discovery (BOLD) Lab is a new UKRI-funded initiative establishing an AI research laboratory led from the University of Oxford, bringing more than 80 researchers from Oxford, UCL and Imperial College London under one vision. It carries an initial investment of around GBP 8 million with the potential for a further GBP 22 million extending the investment over six years, making it one of the UK's largest bets on fundamental AI research. The lab's remit is ambitious, high-risk work on the fundamental science of artificial intelligence, alongside training future leaders in the field. THE ROLE: up to 12 BOLD Fellows are being recruited across the three universities. Fellows are expected to operate with a high level of independence and responsibility, setting their own research direction, publishing at the highest level, and mentoring junior researchers and doctoral students. They also play a leading role in managing the lab and take responsibility for developing its strategic and scientific direction, with primary responsibility for a programme of independent funded research projects. The posting frames the draw as exceptional independence, direct collaboration with world-leading colleagues across the three institutions, access to substantial and rapidly growing compute, and real influence over the intellectual direction and culture of a major national lab. WHO SHOULD APPLY: senior researchers with an established, original research track record in AI or a closely related field, who are a recognised authority in their area. HOW TO APPLY: submit an online application with a covering letter or supporting statement, a CV, and details of two referees. Informal enquiries are welcomed beforehand to the BOLD Exec Team at boldexec-team@eng.ox.ac.uk. NOTE: this is a salaried fixed-term research post rather than a grant. Only applications received before midday on Tuesday 15 September 2026 can be considered.
LASR Labs is a 13-week full-time technical AI safety research programme in London: teams of 3 to 4 write a technical paper on loss-of-control risks under an experienced supervisor, with recent cohorts publishing at NeurIPS, ICLR and ICML workshops, and around 90 percent of alumni moving into AI safety or security roles. FUNDING: GBP 15,000 stipend plus food, office space, and flights/travel. ELIGIBILITY: technical machine-learning or quantitative background, from undergraduates to experienced engineers, with no hard requirements; international applicants get visa support via the UK Government Authorised Exchange programme. Hosted at the London Initiative for Safe AI. Runs 11 January to 9 April 2027. DEADLINE: 20 September 2026, 23:59 GMT.
The ILIAD Fellowship is a 3-month mentored research fellowship producing concrete outputs in applied-mathematical AI alignment research, distinct from ILIAD's four-week taught Intensive. Fellows work in person in London or the SF Bay Area with a USD 6,000 per month travel-and-housing allowance. ELIGIBILITY: primarily PhD and postdoc researchers in mathematics, theoretical physics, theoretical computer science or related fields, though a degree is not a hard requirement given substantial research experience; limited remote flexibility. DEADLINES: 21 September 2026 for the November cohort (2 November 2026 to 5 February 2027); 19 October 2026 for the December cohort (1 December 2026 to 5 March 2027). A single common application at iliad.ac/apply covers the Fellowship and the Intensive.
The Centre for Democratic Resilience (CeDR) at the University of Oxford is hiring a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Computational Social Science and Text Analysis to join an interdisciplinary team building a new computational research agenda on risks to academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and higher education governance. The fellow leads computational analysis of large collections of legal, regulatory, and political texts, developing innovative NLP methods to analyse legislation, policy documents, and political discourse, with particular attention to Germany. REQUIREMENTS: a doctorate (held or near completion) in political science or a related field, with expertise in computational social science and natural language processing. TERMS: full-time, fixed-term for three years, based in Oxford, salary GBP 39,424 to 51,983. APPLICATION: online via the University of Oxford job pages with CV and supporting statement (job reference 188420); online interviews the week of 5 October 2026. Start 1 November 2026 or soon after. NOTE: this is a salaried research job, not a grant. DEADLINE: 25 September 2026, 12 noon UK time.
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 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.
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.