Who funds them, what they fund and how to apply.
An independent research fellowship connecting researchers with mentors in AI alignment, transparency, and security. The main program runs 10 weeks (with an optional 6-12 month extension) and provides a $1,250 weekly stipend, a $2,000-per-week compute budget, housing, meals, and office space in Berkeley and London.
Meta funds academic research through a requests-for-proposals (RFP) mechanism; the research.facebook.com site links research award opportunities and publishes lists of past research award recipients.
6-month in-residence fellowship in Munich or Zurich for embodied AI/robotics builders: $10K/month stipend, up to $2M compute, lab access.
Laude Institute's Moonshots is a research grant competition funding AI projects aimed at humanity's hardest problems across four tracks: accelerating science, advancing healthcare, workforce reskilling, and civic discourse. Its first competition, Moonshots // ONE, drew 125 proposals from 600+ researchers across 47 institutions and deployed $4.1M in seed grants across 25 teams, with seed winners competing for at least one $10M lab to be decided in October 2026; all winning projects commit to sharing their work as open source.
Mozilla Foundation selected ten projects for its global Democracy x AI Cohort. The teams are spending 12 months in Mozilla's Incubator with coaching, expert advice, and peer mentorship while building and testing AI tools intended to strengthen democratic participation and accountability.
Mozilla Foundation Incubator funds values-driven technology projects with coaching and mentorship. The 2025 Making the invisible visible cohort and the 2026 Democracy x AI cohort are underway. Democracy x AI applications closed 16 March 2026. No new cohort is open.
NASA's phased grant program funding early-stage, high-risk aerospace and technology concepts.
Coefficient Giving's (formerly Open Philanthropy) fund supporting technical AI safety research, AI governance and policy, and capacity-building to grow the field. Published grants include general support for organizations, compute funds for AI safety research, and individual research projects such as studies on model organisms of reward-hacking, chain-of-thought faithfulness, latent adversarial training, and software formal verification.
$10,000 Secure AI / usable-security prize for work that helps users make wise security decisions.
A year-round program offering $5,000 to $50,000 in milestone-based funding, NOS, USDC, and GPU credits for teams building AI applications, infrastructure, and tooling on decentralized compute. Applications are reviewed throughout the year.
NRF Singapore's flagship award giving early-career researchers independent research funding in Singapore over five years, up to SGD 3.25 million. The 19th call (Class of 2027) opened 12 February 2026 and closed 13 May 2026. NRF invites applications once a year.
NSF CISE's Future Computing Research solicitation supports foundational and interdisciplinary work across algorithms, communications, computing education, systems, human-centered computing, information systems, networking, robust intelligence, software, and hardware. Proposals are accepted at any time, with recurring target dates for the corresponding review cycles.
Annual U.S. National Science Foundation competition awarding roughly 2,500 fellowships per year to outstanding STEM graduate students, providing three years of a $37k stipend plus a $16k education allowance, usable over five years. Applications, reviews, and awards are handled by a dedicated GRFP Operations Center; the 2026 awards were announced in April 2026 from around 14,000 applicants.
An active NSF Dear Colleague Letter encouraging PESOSE proposals on secure, open protocols for AI agent ecosystems. Proposals may address interoperability, scalability, security, open science, partnerships, education, and training, and must follow the underlying PESOSE solicitation.
NSF's active SBIR/STTR solicitation funds U.S. startups and small businesses developing next-generation scientific instrumentation and enabling technologies, including infrastructure for AI-driven discovery. Phase I proposals may request up to $305,000; applicants must first submit a Project Pitch and receive an invitation to submit a full proposal.
NSF X-Labs is a planned $1.5 billion initiative for large, multiyear awards to independent, full-time research and development teams pursuing technical breakthroughs outside traditional university and industry-lab structures. The first two topic announcements closed in July 2026. Scientific Instrumentation for Sensing and Imaging proposals were due 13 July 2026. Quantum Systems interconnects and integrated photonics proposals were due 24 July 2026. NSF has said additional topics will be announced.
Free program guiding AI startups with training, developer tools, preferred hardware/software pricing, and investor introductions through a VC Alliance. No fees, deadlines, or cohorts — rolling applications.
A dedicated Omidyar Network funding effort, launched with a $30M initial investment, to promote inclusive and responsible development of generative AI. Made at least 6 awards as part of the initial cohort.
Status describes whether a program is running. Application methods are recorded separately. Read the funder’s terms before applying.