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CIFAR delivers the Canadian AI Safety Institute Research Program on behalf of the Government of Canada, and its AI Safety Catalyst Grants stream funds research advancing fundamental and applied work in AI safety at up to 70,000 Canadian dollars per year for up to two years.
The most recent Catalyst call focused specifically on sociotechnical considerations in AI safety and invited applications from researchers in the social sciences and humanities whose work addresses the social, ethical and governance dimensions of AI safety, a framing that deliberately opens AI safety funding to disciplines usually excluded from technical alignment calls. That portal opened 3 October 2025 and closed 14 November 2025.
The programme runs alongside two other streams: Solution Networks in AI Safety, which fund multidisciplinary teams led by a core group of up to six individuals to develop applied solutions to sociotechnical risks from advanced AI systems and for which CIFAR announced over 1 million dollars in March 2026, and participation in the international AI Alignment Project led by the UK AI Security Institute, to which CIFAR committed 1 million dollars in February 2026.
Catalyst calls have recurred annually, so researchers who missed the last round should monitor CIFAR for the next announcement.
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Or search similar grants →According to the current listing, eligibility includes: The most recent Catalyst call was directed at researchers in the social sciences and humanities whose work addresses the social, ethical and governance considerations of AI safety, rather than at technical alignment researchers, which is the key positioning point: a mechanistic interpretability proposal is a poor fit for this stream while a study of AI safety governance, labour effects or public legitimacy is squarely in scope. Funding is up to 70,000 Canadian dollars per year for up to two years. The application portal opened 3 October 2025 and closed 14 November 2025, so this specific round has passed; CIFAR has run Catalyst calls on a recurring basis and publishes new calls on the CAISI Research Program page, making it worth tracking for the next cycle. Researchers whose work is larger in scope or more applied should consider the Solution Networks stream instead, which supports multidisciplinary teams led by a core group of up to six individuals at a materially higher funding level, though the most recent expression-of-interest round for Solution Networks is also closed. Applicants should check the current CIFAR call document for the precise institutional eligibility rules, which are set per call rather than fixed across the programme. Confirm the full requirements in the official notice before applying.
The current listing shows catalyst Grants provide up to 70,000 Canadian dollars per year for up to two years, giving a maximum total of 140,000 Canadian dollars. At approximately 0.72 US dollars to the Canadian dollar, amount_min is recorded as about 50,400 US dollars for a single year at the ceiling and amount_max as about 100,800 US dollars for the full two-year maximum. This is deliberately a catalyst-scale instrument: the budget supports a focused study, a graduate student, or a workshop-and-paper programme rather than a multi-investigator effort, and the two-year horizon signals that CIFAR wants completed, publishable work rather than the start of a longer programme. Separately, the CAISI Research Program funds Solution Networks at a materially larger scale, with more than 1 million dollars referenced for sociotechnical AI safety networks led by multidisciplinary teams of up to six core individuals, so researchers with larger ambitions should watch for that stream rather than stretching a Catalyst application. Verify award ceilings, matching requirements, and allowable costs in the official notice.
The published deadline was November 14, 2025, which has passed. Check the official notice for any future application windows before investing time in a proposal.
CIFAR Canadian AI Safety Institute (CAISI) Research Program AI Safety Catalyst Grants for Sociotechnical AI Safety Research is funded by Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), delivering the Canadian AI Safety Institute (CAISI) Research Program with Government of Canada support. Verify program details on the funder's official page before applying.
Start from the official opportunity page linked in this listing — it carries the sponsor's submission instructions.
EPSRC has opened the explainable AI strand of its Next Generation Artificial Intelligence programme, a 12,050,000 pound call for speculative, high-risk fundamental research that makes AI systems explainable rather than merely accurate. The call names five research directions: output reasoning, where the system articulates why it produced a given output; mechanistic interpretability, which seeks to understand the internal computations of a model; process examination, which audits how a decision was reached; imposed explainability, which builds explanation into architecture by construction rather than recovering it after the fact; and uncertainty quantification, which characterises what a model does not know. The framing is unusually explicit that incremental improvement is not fundable: applications must demonstrate potential for transformative outcomes, and EPSRC uses the phrase speculative and high-risk fundamental research with the potential to deliver high reward. Awards run up to 24 months with a fixed project start of 1 February 2027, and the maximum request is 602,500 pounds at full economic cost with UKRI funding 80 percent. Early and mid-career researchers are particularly welcomed, and joint leadership is permitted with a designated administrative lead. The deadline is 20 October 2026 at 4:00pm UK time, with an information webinar having been held on 8 September 2026.
UKRI has opened a 12,050,000 pound call for speculative, high-risk research aimed at a step change in the sustainability of future AI systems, covering innovation across the whole AI stack rather than any single layer. In scope are energy-efficient algorithms, hardware-software co-design, and AI systems designed to operate under real resource constraints, alongside work that addresses the environmental, social and economic sustainability impacts running through the AI value chain. The framing is notable for treating sustainability as broader than energy per training run: proposals are expected to engage with impacts across the value chain rather than optimising a single benchmark metric. As with the companion explainable AI call, UKRI states it is funding speculative and high-risk research with the potential to deliver high rewards, so incremental efficiency gains over existing baselines are unlikely to compete. Awards run up to 24 months with a fixed start of 1 February 2027 and a ceiling of 602,500 pounds full economic cost at 80 percent UKRI funding. Eligible roles explicitly include research technical professionals, which opens the call to systems and infrastructure specialists who are often excluded from conventional research grants. The deadline is 10 November 2026 at 4:00pm UK time, with a webinar held on 16 September 2026.
UKRI has opened a 5,000,000 pound cross-council call to accelerate the adoption of AI methods inside five priority science and engineering domains: engineering biology, advanced materials, quantum technologies, medical research, and fusion energy. The instrument is deliberately small and fast. Awards are capped at 250,000 pounds full economic cost over up to 12 months with a fixed start date of 26 April 2027, and the central requirement is that a proposal bring together genuine AI expertise with genuine domain expertise rather than either community working alone. Applicants must demonstrate how AI could be applied to address important research challenges in their domain and, critically, explain why an AI collaboration is necessary for that specific challenge, which is a direct filter against proposals that apply a standard model to a dataset and call it adoption. The call opened on 29 September 2026 and closes 1 December 2026 at 4:00pm UK time, with an information webinar held on 14 October 2026. Because the funding is short-duration seed money aimed at building new partnerships, it suits teams that have identified a domain bottleneck and a credible AI collaborator but have no existing joint track record to point to.
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