Beyond Our Gates Foundation Annual Grant Program

The Center for Civic Futures Public Benefit Innovation Fund awards $8.5 million over two years to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence projects designed to improve public benefits programs. Initial cohort of eight projects selected from 400+ responses, with a second open call for projects planned for spring 2026. Funded projects must be 'shovel ready' — already beyond proof-of-concept stages, with established partner networks and demonstrated deep understanding of the problem space in public benefits delivery. Funded initial projects include: multi-state cohort improving AI for SNAP and Medicaid work requirement verification; Maryland partnership with Harvard Kennedy School for unemployment insurance system improvements; New Jersey initiative to scale AI pilots across state government; and infrastructure/evaluation tools for identifying effective generative AI models for public benefits questions. Funded by Ballmer Group, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Renaissance Philanthropy, and Families and Workers Fund. The Fund is positioned as a counterweight to the AI 'pilot purgatory' that has plagued government AI adoption — projects must show clear path to production deployment and measurable outcomes for benefits recipients.

The EQUAL Compute Network is IDRC's response to the most concrete constraint facing AI researchers in the Global South: not talent or ideas, but access to compute. Launched within the CAD 110 million AI for Development (AI4D) partnership funded by the Government of Canada and the UK's FCDO with additional support from the Gates Foundation, EQUAL works through networks housed in public universities across Africa and beyond, and coordinates with the AI for Development Funders Collaborative to pool resources from G7 governments, multilateral institutions and philanthropies. It funds three distinct things. First, cloud credits - reduced-cost access negotiated on behalf of Global South innovators. Second, hardware and capacity building, covering on-premises compute, technical certifications and data science support, which matters in contexts where bandwidth and foreign-currency billing make cloud impractical. Third, research and networking, including study of what sustainable compute infrastructure actually looks like in low-resource settings and of low-resource innovation methods. Priority goes to AI4D grantees and affiliated labs, and to solutions aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals in health, education and food security. AI4D entered its second phase in 2024 with scope broadened from Africa alone to low- and lower-middle-income countries across South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. IDRC does not run EQUAL as a single open call with a fixed deadline; access is arranged through AI4D programme channels and periodic calls, so the practical route is to engage the AI4D network and monitor idrc-crdi.ca and ai4d.ai for openings.

MURI is the largest single-award basic research instrument available to university teams working on AI and autonomy, and its structure explains why: it deliberately funds problems that cannot be solved within one discipline. The Department of Defense runs it through the three service basic research offices - ONR, ARO and AFOSR - and describes it as addressing high-risk basic research attempting to understand or achieve something that has never been done before. Award scale is what sets it apart from ordinary single-investigator grants: roughly $1.25 million to $1.5 million per year for three years, with an option to extend by two additional years, against a total program envelope reported at approximately $170 million annually across all topics. Artificial intelligence and autonomy is an explicitly named priority topic area, spanning trustworthy machine learning, autonomous systems, human-machine teaming, and information sensing and processing, and it sits alongside the other defense-relevant areas the services solicit against - advanced materials and manufacturing, quantum sciences, biotechnology and human performance among them. The services have solicited across roughly 22 topic areas in recent cycles, and topics rotate year to year, so the exact AI and autonomy topic wording changes and matters enormously for proposal fit. The FY2027 cycle timing is the practical thing to plan around: a new FY2027 notice of funding opportunity is expected around March 2027, with white papers expected in May 2026 and full proposals in September 2026 in the cycle reported here. MURI is a team instrument, not an individual one - the whole point is assembling investigators across disciplines - and the white-paper stage is genuinely gating, so the preparation runway is long.