Currently 23 active research and journalism 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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The AI Philosophy Competition, organised by philosophers Zachary Goodsell and Elliott Thornley and funded by Forethought Research, aims to gauge the philosophical capabilities of AI in a way transparent to the philosophical community. Entrants submit up to three original essays on any philosophical topic; essays must be primarily AI-generated, with some human guidance allowed, and each entry must include a methodology report explaining how the essay was produced. Essays are capped at 6,000 words each and may not be previously published or under review elsewhere; entrants consent to online publication and may choose anonymity. Judging is blind to methodology and authorship and evaluates the quality and originality of the philosophical content (style is not graded); the judging committee includes David Chalmers, John Hawthorne, Herman Cappelen, Cian Dorr and other academic philosophers. PRIZES: USD 3,000 / 2,000 / 1,000 for the top three essays, plus a USD 5,000 creative methodology pool. Finalists announced early December 2026, results end of January 2027. DEADLINE: 31 October 2026.
The Open Notebook's paid fellowship for early-career science journalists is open for its 2027 round. Fellows spend twelve months working part-time and remotely with a personal mentor, reporting and writing articles about the craft of science journalism that are published at The Open Notebook, one of the field's central craft resources. Eligibility: early-career science journalists with fewer than three years of regular professional science-writing experience; applicants from anywhere in the world are welcome, and application materials are in English. TO APPLY: submit the application form (linked from the program page) by 31 October 2026, 11:59 PM US Central time; reference letters are due 7 November 2026. The fellowship year starts 9 February 2027.
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.
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 UCLA Library Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP), funded by Arcadia, grants its ninth cohort of awards to preserve, document and digitize cultural heritage collections at risk from environmental conditions, political uncertainty, inherently unsustainable media, inappropriate storage, or communal and social change. IN SCOPE: 20th and 21st century materials, including print, photographic, film, video, audio, ephemeral and born-digital objects; all funded materials are published open access in the UCLA Library Digital Collections repository. GRANT TYPES: Planning Grants up to USD 20,000 over one year for organization, survey and inventory work before digitization; Project Grants up to USD 70,000 over two years for digitization and metadata creation on collections ready to digitize, or for curating existing digital assets; Regional Grants up to USD 100,000 over two years for digital collections combining materials from three or more institutions, families or archival repositories around one theme, community or historical event, hosted by an organizing institution with prior MEAP grant experience (consult MEAP staff before applying). There is also an invitation-only Emergency Grant track up to USD 10,000 (email meap@library.ucla.edu), and a new AV Grants track up to USD 100,000 for audiovisual archives opening April 2027 with selections in September 2027. TIMELINE: applications opened 14 September 2026; preliminary application webinar 15 October 2026; preliminary applications due Monday 16 November 2026 at 11:59pm Pacific Time via meap.smapply.io; preliminary decisions December 2026; detailed applications due 12 February 2027; awards announced summer 2027. Applications name teams working with the institutions, families or repositories that hold the collections; read the Program Guidelines and Project Eligibility documents on the MEAP site before applying.
The Mensch Maschine VISIT Residency Program is an annual fellowship offering four fully funded fellowships to artists from around the world, run by the JUNGE AKADEMIE of the Akademie der Künste (Berlin) with VISIT, the artist-in-residence programme of the E.ON Foundation, E-WERK Luckenwalde and Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw). The 2027 edition particularly encourages projects at the intersection of art, energy and ecology exploring the theme ENERGY GHOSTS: the unseen dimensions of energy approached through mythology, cosmology or speculative fiction, the invisible infrastructures, histories and residues that haunt contemporary life, and energy as an ecological, political or spiritual force. Proposals are welcome from visual art, performance, film, installation, sound, writing and new media. WHAT YOU GET: EUR 20,000 per fellow for artist fees and production costs of a new project (research and development, travel, material and presentation costs); three fellows receive studio space and accommodation at E-WERK Luckenwalde (a former power station about 40 minutes south of Berlin), one is accommodated by the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. The three-month residency runs roughly September to November 2027 with on-site presence of at least 75% required, a retreat at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw in September 2027, events across the three venues, and a closing symposium in October 2027 at the Akademie der Künste where fellows show work in progress alongside the 2026 cohort. JURY: Nolan Oswald Dennis; Chus Martinez (Institute Art Gender Nature, TBA21); Sarah Johanna Theurer (Fondation Beyeler); Anh-Linh Ngo (Akademie der Künste); and Tiara Roxanne. APPLICATION: via the VISIT portal at visit-energy.com/bewerben. DEADLINE: 1 December 2026, 23:59 CET.
Stanford's nine-month residential fellowship for journalists and people who work in service of journalism (editors, producers, photographers, audience and community builders, publishers, operations and strategy staff). Fellows bring a question about journalism they cannot let go of rather than a fixed project, and pursue it with a small international cohort, individual coaching, customised workshops and the run of Stanford; many fellows work on AI, platforms, information ecosystems and audience trust. ELIGIBILITY: at least five years of professional experience (student work and internships don't count); no degree or newsroom background required; freelancers must do most of their work in journalism. Not eligible: PR or communications staff, government employees, full-time academics, staff of non-editorially-independent media, degree seekers, book or reporting projects. APPLICATION: via SurveyMonkey Apply (jsk.smapply.org); deadline 2 December 2026 at 1pm Pacific, no extensions. Info webinars on 21 October and 5, 6 and 12 November 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 Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri funds people and teams to build and launch a tool, workflow or product that helps newsrooms, in three tracks: Individual (USD 75,000), Institutional (USD 75,000, paid to a host organisation or the fellow) and Emerging Technology (USD 100,000, where AI or another new technology must be essential to the solution). The output must be a free, open-source resource usable by US journalists; tools limited to one city or state are unlikely to be funded. The fellowship is remote and runs for eight months from 28 June 2027 with an in-person kickoff at RJI and a couple of paid visits. ELIGIBILITY: anyone, anywhere; no age, background or journalism credential required. Applications open 2 November 2026 on Submittable; a shortlist is invited in early to mid February 2027 to submit a fuller application, with finalist interviews 5 to 23 April 2027. DEADLINE: 8 January 2027 (first round; no time zone stated, RJI is on US Central time).
ARDC funds amateur radio, wireless technology education, and communications research and development, including software-defined radio, mesh and packet networking, and open RF tooling, which puts it squarely at the transmission-art and community-network end of creative tech. WHAT YOU GET: grants with no stated minimum or maximum; the published 2026 portfolio ranges from USD 1,285 to USD 258,000, so both small education projects and major open-source radio infrastructure are funded. CONDITIONS: all funded work must be released openly (GPL, MIT, BSD, CERN OHL or CC licenses). ELIGIBILITY: US 501(c)(3) nonprofits, government agencies, schools and universities, and international nonprofits and schools; individuals, artist collectives and radio clubs must apply through a nonprofit fiscal sponsor, which is routine in the US but adds overhead. APPLICATION: open now on a quarterly cadence; the September 2026 round has closed, so the next actionable deadline is 15 January 2027, with evaluation taking 60 to 120 days.
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.
OSIP is the European Space Agency's standing front door for unsolicited novel ideas, launched in 2019 and now the main entry point for new concepts into ESA, both in response to specific problems and through open calls. HOW IT WORKS: ideas are submitted through two mechanisms. Campaigns are targeted calls responding to specific questions with defined timelines (recent examples include Future Navigation Demonstrators and elements for the EOCognitiveLab mission); Channels are permanently open, open-ended calls on broader topics with no deadline. Submissions can go through an optional community discussion phase, with voting and comments, before expert evaluation by ESA. WHO CAN SUBMIT: individuals, businesses, universities and organisations anywhere in the world. The catch for funding: to implement a funded idea yourself, you must be eligible to do business with ESA under Article 18 of its procurement regulations, which in practice means affiliation with an entity in an ESA member state. WHAT FUNDING LOOKS LIKE: successful ideas are typically supported as co-funded PhD or postdoctoral research (ESA plus a university), early technology development activities, or system studies; amounts vary by route and campaign. WHY IT IS ON THE DESK: this is the one genuinely public, always-open route into ESA for independent researchers, technologists and artists working with space data or space technology concepts; new campaigns appear regularly, so checking the platform periodically is worthwhile. Submit via ideas.esa.int.
Pulitzer Center reporting grants supporting in-depth international journalism on under-reported global issues. Open to reporters, photographers, audio and video journalists, and documentary filmmakers worldwide. Grants cover the hard costs of reporting projects. ELIGIBILITY: professional journalists and visual storytellers anywhere in the world; both freelance and staff. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis via the Pulitzer Center grant portal.
Funds data-driven reporting that uses ML, NLP, satellite imagery, sensors and other computational methods on under-reported issues. Open to freelance and staff data journalists worldwide. Reviewed first-come, first-served on a rolling basis; decisions usually within a month.
The Digital Defenders Partnership runs the main rapid-response fund for digital threats against human rights defenders, journalists, activists and the organisations they work in. The Incident Response Fund covers urgent costs after or during a digital attack, including incident response and forensics, emergency infrastructure or hosting changes, secure devices, account recovery, legal or psychosocial support tied to the incident, and short-term relocation of digital operations. This is the practical counterpart to physical-safety emergency funds for anyone whose work makes them a target online. ELIGIBILITY: human rights defenders, journalists, activists and civil-society organisations facing digital threats or attacks, worldwide. Applications are rolling; DDP aims to respond within two weeks and funds activities for up to four months. DDP also runs a Sustainable Protection Fund for longer-term digital-security capacity building (currently invitation-only in some regions) and an invitation-only Community and Network Fund of up to EUR 15,000 for rapid responders and digital-security facilitators. Contact team@digitaldefenders.org or apply through apply.grants.digitaldefenders.org.
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 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.
MAGIC Grants, a US 501(c)(3), funds applied privacy-technology research and development through its Monero Fund: cryptographic security proofs, membership proofs, privacy, UX and efficiency improvements, audits, and infrastructure in and around the Monero ecosystem. Grants run USD 5,000-20,000 equivalent and are open to all competent researchers regardless of educational attainment, as individuals or teams, internationally (standard US nonprofit due-diligence and sanctions screening applies). One of the few rolling, individual-friendly privacy-tech research funds; decisions typically arrive within three weeks.
NOTE: this tier is institutions-only; individual researchers cannot apply in a personal capacity but can serve as principal investigators through their institution. Anthropic's earlier Economic Futures Research Awards (USD 10,000-50,000 plus USD 5,000 Claude API credits for empirical research on AI's economic impacts, rolling, with results presented within six months) are currently not accepting applications; this entry covers the larger Research Fund now open for proposals. THE FUND: Anthropic has committed USD 200 million to the Economic Futures Research Fund to support ambitious external research on interventions that prepare society for the economic impacts of AI, studying what programs could make the economy more flexible and resilient, ensure AI's benefits are shared, and minimise harm from AI-driven disruption. FIVE RESEARCH PRIORITIES: (1) AI's impact on workers at the firm and workplace level; (2) equipping people for AI-driven transitions; (3) modernising income support for displacement; (4) building worker stakes in AI-driven growth; (5) generating evidence on public investments. FUNDING: projects primarily in the USD 5-30 million range, minimum USD 1 million, flexible upward for well-scoped, high-potential-impact projects. ELIGIBILITY: accredited universities and other degree-granting institutions, independent research institutes and policy research organisations, and nonprofits with a track record of running field experiments at scale; a global fund with an initially US-centric focus. APPLICATION: via the request for proposals linked from the research agenda announcement (Google Form); no deadline published as of September 2026.
FfAI gives grants to individuals active in visual art and culture (artists, curators, critics, researchers, writers, organizers) for independent travel and research, and to small institutions for general activities and projects. AMOUNTS: USD 10,000 for individual research grants; institutional grants typically USD 10,000 to 25,000, limited to organizations with annual budgets under USD 1,000,000 (US organizations must be IRS 501(c)(3) nonprofits; non-US organizations must be created and operated exclusively for charitable and/or educational purposes, with a signed statement from an authorized officer). NOT FUNDED: scholarships, residency programs, production of work, or major equipment; research and travel must be independent of institutional or professional obligations, and funds cannot be transferred to anyone else. PROCESS: two-stage and rolling; anyone can submit an inquiry via the form at apply.ffaiarts.net, but a full proposal must be invited; if you do not hear back within four months, the inquiry was not selected. DEADLINE: none (rolling inquiries). NOTE: there is no conventional 'open call' page; the grants page only sketches the two grant types, the guidelines page holds the amounts and rules, and the entry point is the inquiry form at apply.ffaiarts.net.
EA Funds closed the Long-Term Future Fund and launched the Transformative AI Fund in its place. It makes early-stage, fast grants for work on transformative AI, mainly reducing global catastrophic risks from advanced AI: training, field-building, technical research, policy analysis, forecasting, advocacy and demonstration projects, with a smaller share for other implications such as flourishing futures and digital sentience. Biosecurity and nuclear work are funded only where they intersect with AI. ELIGIBILITY: individuals, new organisations, and existing organisations starting a new project; not geographically restricted. Always open to applications via the EA Funds form.