Currently 22 active ai and ai safety grants, fellowships and residencies open to applicants in Worldwide. 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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Normsy, a project of Civic Health Project, runs a small methods incubator for new strategies to measure or estimate the impact of prosocial social-media interventions. Normsy identifies toxic posts (typically content attacking or violating civic norms) and offers real users a set of AI-generated prosocial comments to choose from and post; the open question is how to estimate the effect of those comments on content producers, other commenters and bystanders who consume content without interacting measurably. The current approach combines survey experiments (how active X users respond emotionally to threads with and without the intervention, and how it shifts agreement with and support for the original post) with paid X API platform data (classifying comments before and after an intervention, plus coarse engagement metrics that cost money each time they are recollected). WHAT THEY WANT: a systematic way to leverage available platform data and maximise the utility of the survey experiments. Example proposals include a strategy for measuring toxicity/prosociality and reach/visibility of a thread over time with a randomisation design generating a control group of threads, or an approach to benchmarking the prosocial potential of AI-generated comments through an iterative arena with human judges or a theory-backed LLM validation approach with human validation. The brief is explicit that methodological innovation, causal identification, scalable measurement frameworks and novel observational approaches matter far more than proposing new intervention types; proposals need not study Normsy exclusively but must explain how the evaluation design transfers to it. Ethics and IRB considerations are central and Normsy will collaborate with selected researchers on ethics review and implementation planning. Researchers retain publication independence and IP; the partnership is expected to produce data for an academic paper. SUBMIT: one zipped folder through the linked Google Form containing a 3-page proposal (design, work already done, work still needed to scale and implement), a budget document for the USD 20,000, a timeline with concrete deliverables inside 6 months, and short bios for all team members. Award notifications mid-October 2026. Questions to kylan@civichealthproject.org; informal and exploratory conversations welcome.
The Wilson Center, the congressionally chartered nonpartisan policy research institution in Washington DC, awards 10 to 20 research fellowships for its 2027-2028 class. Fellows conduct research and write in their areas of interest while interacting with policymakers in Washington and with other fellows. The Center accepts policy-relevant, nonpartisan proposals that address key foreign policy challenges confronting the United States and the world, and projects must align with at least one of the Center's four scholarship pillars: strategic competition, economic statecraft, TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION, and regional scholarship. The technology and innovation pillar is the relevant route for AI governance, emerging technology and digital policy projects, which the Center also supports through its Science and Technology Innovation Program. Fellows work remotely for the duration of the fellowship; the Center covers travel costs for two required trips to Washington DC at the beginning and the conclusion of the term. The stipend is USD 10,000 per month for the twelve-month term, which runs 1 June 2027 to 30 May 2028. ELIGIBILITY: academic candidates need a PhD in hand and either a published book or monograph beyond the dissertation, or a substantial body of research articles (five or more) in reputable peer-reviewed journals. Non-academic applicants (practitioners, journalists, public intellectuals) need at least ten years of relevant experience and a record of substantial policy impact. There is no citizenship restriction, but English proficiency is required. Applications, including letters of recommendation, must be submitted online via Interfolio by 11:59pm ET on 30 September 2026. Questions: fellowships@wilsoncenter.org. NOTE: this is an open-topic foreign policy fellowship, not an AI-specific one; the technology angle depends on how you scope the proposal.
NEXT ART AI is an open AI art competition run by the HOBAN Cultural Foundation, welcoming participants of all backgrounds regardless of career, nationality or age, and framed as a way to reflect on the future of AI art through new modes of expression and artistic experimentation. TWO CATEGORIES: AI IMAGE ART, for works in a single-image format at 150dpi or higher, submitted as JPG, JPEG, PNG or BMP up to 10MB; and AI VIDEO ART, open to a wide range of video formats including animation, motion graphics and live-action footage enhanced or transformed using AI, at 1080p or higher, under one minute, 30 or 60fps recommended, stereo 48kHz audio recommended, as mp4 (h.264) or mov. Video entries are submitted as a URL via YouTube, Vimeo, Dropbox or OneDrive, or an alternative platform if those are restricted in your region; links that are inaccessible due to privacy settings may be excluded from judging. WHO CAN ENTER: individuals or teams of up to three including the representative, though you may not submit both as an individual and as part of a team. Team representatives create the account in their own name and all members submit a consent form for personal data. Applicants under 19 need a guardian's signed consent. One work may be submitted per category. RULES ON AI AND ASSETS: work must be original and created by the applicant or team, and must be image or video art created using generative AI platforms. Works that have previously won an award in another competition are not eligible. Free or paid external assets, game engines, AI frameworks, open-source tools and editing software may be used freely, but applicants must hold licences permitting commercial use for every element, and work infringing third-party rights is excluded. Even where external assets and editing software are used, the creative process must involve AI, whether AI-assisted direction, transformation, generation or other AI-based processes, and the choice of AI tools, the scope and method of their use, and the prompts themselves are all weighed in evaluating the creative use of AI. TIMELINE: applications open 1 September 2026 and close 30 September 2026 at 11:59pm KST, preliminary round early October, final round late October, announcement and ceremony early November, exhibition late November 2026. Organised and hosted by the HOBAN Cultural Foundation, sponsored by HOBAN Group, with Seoul Shinmun and EBN as media partners. Details and schedule are subject to change at the organiser's discretion.
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.
A bias bounty from Zindi, Humane Intelligence, Radiant Earth, and the Heising-Simons Foundation: measure coverage gaps in Overture Maps across US Census tracts by comparing it against Census TIGER/Line Roads, Microsoft US Building Footprints, USGS National Map critical facilities, and Census County Business Patterns. Submissions are automatically evaluated with a Bias Score assessing equity metrics across demographic and climate-vulnerability strata, surfacing whose neighbourhoods open map data underserves. PRIZES: 1st USD 4,500, 2nd USD 2,500, 3rd USD 1,500, Best Bias Discovery USD 1,000, Best Documentation USD 500 (USD 10,000 total), plus 10,000 Zindi points. ELIGIBILITY: open to all, teams of up to 4. HOW TO ENTER: create a Zindi account, download the sample submission files, compute coverage-gap scores per tract GEOID, and upload a CSV; 10 submissions per day, 300 total. Free to enter. DEADLINE: 31 October 2026.
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 ARC Prize Foundation runs its 2026 competition for progress toward artificial general intelligence, with a USD 2,000,000 total prize pool across three tracks: the main Kaggle competition on the ARC-AGI-2 static reasoning benchmark, a track on ARC-AGI-3 interactive agent reasoning (second milestone 30 September 2026), and a paper prize for research that advances understanding of ARC-AGI performance. Milestone prizes run USD 25,000 / 10,000 / 2,500. Open to individuals and teams worldwide, entirely online via Kaggle. Winning entries must be open-sourced under permissive licenses to collect prizes. Main submission deadline 2 November 2026, paper track 8 November 2026; results announced 4 December 2026.
The Omidyar Network Tech Journalism Fund offers rolling grants of $5,000-$25,000 for technology journalism projects. Relevant for journalists and media organizations investigating AI, tech policy, and AI's impacts on culture, society, and creative industries. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis through December 31, 2026 — one of the few currently open opportunities with a confirmed near-term deadline. Apply via the application form on omidyar.com.
The New Media Film Festival in Los Angeles champions stories told with new technology and was among the first festivals to screen AI-generated content; it has a dedicated AR / MR / AI / TECH category. Open worldwide in all formats. Deadlines: 6 December 2026 (USD 80), 6 February 2027 (USD 85), final 6 April 2027 (USD 95).
Robot foundation models (pi-zero, OpenVLA, GR00T and others) are approaching widespread deployment on the back of more than USD 18 billion in funding, and almost nobody is working on their safety. The Physical AI Safety Institute, a new nonprofit founded by Bear Haon and Kaylene Stocking and seeded by a grant from BlueDot Impact, describes itself as a capacity-building organisation growing the community that develops techniques to interpret, align and control robot foundation models. Its research fellowship runs in 12-week cohorts: each fellow works within a stream led by a mentor on a concrete problem in physical AI safety, with mentors drawn from researchers with track records in robot foundation models, mechanistic interpretability, safe control or adversarial robustness for embodied systems. Each cohort ends with a research symposium where fellows present their work. STREAMS: mechanistic interpretability (sparse autoencoders and activation patching for VLA and WAM architectures); adversarial robustness (jailbreaking and prompt injection in the embodied action space); runtime monitoring (detecting when a policy operates outside its competence envelope); sim-to-real safety transfer (do safety behaviours survive deployment on physical hardware); and robot security (cyberattack vectors, data poisoning and supply chain for deployed robot models). WHO SHOULD APPLY: researchers with strong technical foundations in robotics or machine learning and a demonstrated interest in safety; prior safety experience is not required. PROCESS: this stage is an expression of interest, not a full application. The form takes about two minutes and asks you to pick your stream and preferred cohort dates; concrete details including stipend figures and application deadlines are shared through that channel, and neither is published on the site as of listing. PAISI also publishes seven free curriculum modules running from classical robot safety through VLA interpretability, adversarial robustness and runtime monitoring to deployment evaluation, plus a white paper, The Case for Physical AI Safety, at paisi.ai/the-case-for-physical-ai-safety. Contact: bear@paisi.ai.
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.
Effective Altruism Funds' Long-Term Future Fund makes grants to individuals and small groups working to reduce risks from advanced AI and other threats to humanity's long-term future, including technical AI safety and alignment research, field-building and communication. ELIGIBILITY: individuals and small groups; not geographically restricted. Applications accepted on a rolling basis via the EA Funds application form.
Rolling grant programme funding individuals at any career stage who want to pursue careers that could help reduce global catastrophic risks or otherwise improve the long-term future. Especially interested in candidates working on risks from future advances in AI and global catastrophic biological risks. Funds graduate study (master's/PhD/MPP/law school), unpaid internships, postdocs, professional certifications, online courses, independent study/upskilling, career-transition and exploration periods, and academic sabbaticals. Concrete examples Coefficient Giving lists: a senior ML engineer doing six months of independent study to investigate AI risk mitigation careers; a physics PhD doing self-guided ML interpretability work to transition into technical AI safety; a management consultant exploring how to apply their skill set to GCR; a tenured ML/CS professor taking a one-year sabbatical to contribute to AI safety or governance. Open globally; no institutional affiliation required. Looks for candidates whose funding would 'make a difference' (otherwise unable to find sufficient funding, or existing funding has restrictions). Encourages applications from women and people of color. Now subsumes the former Biosecurity Scholarship. Applications are open until further notice and assessed on a rolling basis. Free to apply.
Lightweight rolling grant for individual journalists worldwide (writers, photographers, radio, film; freelance or staff) examining how AI systems are designed, sold and deployed in communities. Faster turnaround than the Pulitzer AI Accountability Fellowship: decisions in 1 to 2 weeks.
Rest of World is in the third year of its Labor x Tech program, underwritten by the Ford Foundation, commissioning reported stories on the changing nature of work at a moment of upheaval: AI tools and robotics reshaping professions at every rung of society, from self-driving cars replacing drivers to humanoid robots working alongside nurses; lay-offs across the tech industry; and the gig work model continuing to reshape traditional employment. The programme's premise is that this moment needs documenting now, in stories that help prepare society for what comes next. WHAT THEY COMMISSION: reported stories of 800 to 1,000 words from around the world on this beat, at a fee of USD 1,000 per story. WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR, based on previous years: how new technology is transforming existing industries in unique ways and creating unexpected new pockets of employment; how technology is leading to significant job gain, job loss, and government responses to those trends; whether large demographic shifts are following the adoption of new technology or the arrival of new industries; how workplace technology is changing workplace dynamics; how new industries and tools are changing workers' incomes; and the expansion of the gig work model alongside the threats of automation. EXAMPLES of the kind of story they hope to commission, all previously published by Rest of World: workers in Chinese data factories teaching humanoid robots boring tasks; entry-level tech workers describing the AI-fuelled jobpocalypse; Microsoft and Google claiming their data centres create thousands of jobs while their permit filings say otherwise; AI helping judges close cases quickly and lawyers open them quickly; tech workers fuelling a mini baby boom in Taiwan's Silicon Valley; Dubai's robotaxi ambitions coming for human drivers; and the job brokers who run the lives of the migrant workers staffing Taiwan's chip plants. ELIGIBILITY NOTE: the programme is unable to commission reporting in India or from writers based in India for this series. HOW TO PITCH: send 2 to 3 paragraphs laying out the nutgraf of the proposal and explaining how the pitch fits the editorial mission of the programme. Indicate what sources will be used, whether any pre-reporting has been completed, what reporting has already been done on the topic at other outlets, and what the story contributes to the discourse. Pitches go to laborxtech@restofworld.org. Pitching is open on a rolling basis; no closing date is stated.
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.
BlueDot Impact runs a rolling micro-grants program for people working on concrete AI safety projects where money is the bottleneck. Grants of up to USD 10,000 (more negotiable on request) cover compute and API credits, events and meetups, research access, travel, community chapters and project tooling. The process is deliberately fast: average reply within a day, and nine in ten applicants hear back within a week, with funds typically wired upfront rather than reimbursed. Open to anyone worldwide working on a concrete AI safety project; BlueDot course alumni and active members of the AI safety and biosecurity communities are prioritized. Rolling applications, no deadline.
The Center on Long-Term Risk makes rolling grants for research that reduces long-term risks and suffering risks (s-risks) from transformative AI, including AI safety, macrostrategy, cooperative AI and decision theory work. Recipients may be individuals, charitable organizations or academic institutions; funded formats include independent research, academic scholarships and tuition, teaching buyouts and career development for promising researchers. Grant sizes vary widely, from around USD 1,300 to historical grants over USD 250,000, and decisions are made by a simple majority of the three fund managers with external experts consulted as needed. The fund is flexible on project type if it believes you can do high-quality work relevant to s-risks now or in the future. Rolling applications via the online form.
The Institute for Progress pays authors to develop short pitches (200-400 words) into full published project plans for preparing the world for advanced AI, across three areas: accelerating science, strengthening security, and adapting institutions. Authors of selected proposals receive a USD 10,000 honorarium once the full plan is published, plus IFP advisory support, funder matchmaking and help recruiting project leads; USD 1,000 bounties go to successful referrals and published new ideas. Applicants who want to build their own proposal are welcome. Rolling submissions with no deadline; early submissions are prioritized.
Halcyon Futures makes fast grants to exceptional people founding new organizations in AI safety and alignment, biosecurity, cybersecurity and AI governance/policy. Nonprofit seed grants run up to USD 1,000,000 to get new projects off the ground, and career transition grants up to USD 500,000 support leaders at career inflection points searching out their next big project; the org states it often wires money within days. Grantees also get mentorship, introductions and founder community events. (Halcyon also runs a separate venture capital arm; the grant tracks are non-dilutive.) Rolling; contact via the Request for Founders link or hello@halcyonfutures.org.