Cooperative AI Foundation Grants is sponsored by Cooperative AI Foundation (CAIF). CAIF's mission is to support research that will improve the cooperative intelligence of advanced AI for the benefit of all. They intend to make grants to support Cooperative AI research, especially that which is important, tractable, and neglected.

This includes work that helps build up the infrastructure of the field, such as novel benchmark environments and metrics of cooperative success.

This is a call for research proposals. We do not accept proposals for educational or advocacy projects in this process, but if you have such ideas related to cooperative AI you are welcome to reach out to us . Your proposal needs to correspond to at least one of our research areas listed below.

Please only submit proposals for work on the listed areas. If you think there is an important area that is in line with our mission, but that is not included, you are welcome to reach out to us with a suggestion and we will consider if it should be included in a future call for proposals.

The first two areas, Understanding and Evaluating Cooperation-Relevant Capabilities and Propensities, will be especially high priority for us in the upcoming grant round. Guidelines & Selection Criteria The following guidelines have been developed to clarify our funding priorities. Please read the guidelines carefully before preparing your proposal, as they cover most of the reasons for why proposals are rejected.

You can read about projects that we have previously funded here . Other relevant works are cited as part of the scope description. Finally, the Introduction to Cooperative AI Curriculum is currently in development, but can be accessed if you would like a more general introduction to the research field of cooperative AI.

Understanding and Evaluating Cooperation-Relevant Capabilities (High Priority) Understanding and Evaluating Cooperation-Relevant Propensities (High Priority) Incentivizing Cooperation Among AI Agents AI for Facilitating Human Cooperation Monitoring and Controlling Dynamic Networks of Agents and Emergent Properties Information Asymmetries and Transparency Understanding and Evaluating Cooperation-Relevant Capabilities (High Priority) Understanding and Evaluating Cooperation-Relevant Propensities (High Priority) Incentivizing Cooperation Among AI Agents AI for Facilitating Human Cooperation Monitoring and Controlling Dynamic Networks of Agents and Emergent Properties Information Asymmetries and Transparency Guidelines for Benchmarks and Evaluations Technical and Methodological Guidelines Proposal Writing Guidelines Formal research training and degrees (such as a doctoral degree) tend to strengthen your proposal, but are not strictly required.

An affiliation can, in many cases, strengthen your proposal, but is not required. Note that processing of applications from unaffiliated individuals may take longer. You can be located anywhere in the world.

For countries with a low Corruption Perceptions Index , processing may take longer due to a more extensive due diligence process. The project you propose can be up to two years long, and should begin within at most one year from the application deadline. For now, we will not process applications for less than GBP 10,000.

This may change in the future. Our aim is to be able to cover all costs for completing accepted projects. This could include: Personnel costs for research staff; Materials (including software and compute); We allow a maximum of 10% in indirect costs (overhead).

We do not cover personnel costs for teaching. We do not have a fixed upper limit on the size of funding requests we consider, but cost-effectiveness is important to us and we regularly reject proposals where the costs do not stand in proportion to the expected impact.

At the same time, applicants should not refrain from ambition: if your project could have many times the impact with a commensurately smaller increase in costs, we encourage you to highlight this to us. In the past we have worked with applicants to fund both more modest and more ambitious versions of their original proposal. Advisors, affiliates, and contractors of CAIF are eligible for grant funding.

We will manage conflicts of interest in accordance with our policies. Concretely, this means that external reviewers will play an important role in assessing such applications. ‍ Early-career researchers can also apply to our early-career track.

Such projects should have a budget of maximum GBP 100,000 and can be up to 12 months, and the project should be primarily carried out by a single individual (rather than by a team).

We expect most early-career applicants to apply within 2-3 years of completing their PhD (or to be at a similar career stage if they do not have a PhD), but we are open to receiving applications to this track from slightly more junior and slightly more senior researchers.

The difference with the early-career track compared to a regular application is that the assessment will consider to what extent the grant would further the career of a promising researcher, in addition to the merits and expected impact of the project itself. You can check a box in your application form to indicate that you want to apply in the early-career track. All applicants are invited to submit a pre-proposal for the deadline.

This consists of details about the applicant, a pre-proposal of up to 2 pages (not including references) and an estimate of the total budget and project length. Applications are due before 23:59 anywhere on earth (AoE) on the day of the deadline. With the support of internal and external reviewers, we will select a small number of applicants that will be invited to submit a full proposal.

These applicants will be given detailed feedback both on their pre-proposal and later on their full submission They will also have the opportunity to reply and update their proposals in response to reviewer feedback before a final decision is made. We expect to make the final decisions for successful applicants by May 2025.

Note that an invitation to submit a full proposal should not be taken as a funding commitment, and that we expect that some of the full proposals will ultimately be rejected. Nevertheless, we hope that the two-stage, interactive process ultimately saves applicants time and effort, and leads to a greater likelihood of funding than a one-stage, non-interactive process. Applications are processed via the SurveyMonkey Apply platform .

Can I submit more than one application? Yes, if you have more than one distinct research proposal that falls under the scope of the grant call, then you are welcome to submit more than one application. Each application will be considered completely independently.

How "neglected" does something have to be for you to fund it? It is important that we use our funding in a cost-effective way to fulfill our mission. A part of this is avoiding funding work that would be likely to happen (soon) regardless of our support.

This is often hard to evaluate, but, for example, it is unlikely that we would fund research that is aiming at producing results or patents that would be commercially valuable, as this type of research can typically attract other funding. Is there a limit on indirect costs/overhead? Yes, we allow a maximum of 10% indirect costs.

This should be calculated as 10% of the direct costs. I’m still uncertain whether my proposal fits the scope of the call, can you help me? If you have gone over the call description and application guidelines and you are still uncertain whether you should apply, you are welcome to reach out to us with a short description of your idea.

Please use our contact form . We will try to provide feedback to everyone and also continue to update this FAQ. Note that we will take longer to respond over the period of December 21st - January 2nd.

Will funds to universities be processed as a "grant" or a "gift"? We offer funding for universities in the form of grants (as opposed to unconditional gifts). Who will see my application?

Your application may be read by administrative staff and both internal and external reviewers. CAIF’s trustees may also access applications, if necessary. We do not share the identity of reviewers with applicants.

What do you mean by "multi-agent/cooperation problems"? We fund research that is focused on addressing multi-agent/cooperation problems involving AI. Typically, multi-agent problems include multiple artificial agents, or multiple human agents and at least one artificial agent.

A few important things to note on this topic are: - We believe that the most important cooperation failures occur when agents have different objectives.

This means that we are significantly less likely to view work in the fully cooperative setting as scoring highly on impact, in terms of CAIF’s mission; - We will generally not consider work on aligning one artificial agent to one principal (a human), even if that problem technically does consist of two agents; - Please note that cooperative AI does not necessarily include work on helping humans cooperate to build AI – in short, our focus is on "AI for cooperation", not "cooperation for AI".

How much funding can I apply for? We have not set any upper bound for how much funding you can apply for. However, the budget should be for a maximum of two years, and you should ensure a prudent use of funds and consider the criteria on cost-effectiveness.

To begin with, we will not process applications for less than GBP 10,000. This may change in the future. The grants we have made so far range from GBP 10,000 to GBP 385,000, with a median size close to GBP 150,000.

How do you assess if my research will be relevant for the most advanced AI systems, including future systems? We cannot know for sure which work will be most relevant to AI systems that do not yet exist, but there are some things that can make work less likely to be relevant for future systems. This would for example be if your research depends a lot on properties of existing systems that we expect to change in subsequent generations.

An example of something that would be less relevant here are theoretical analyses that make very restrictive assumptions and are unlikely to generalise, such that they're unlikely to tell us anything about real-world advanced AI systems. Can I apply for funding for travel? You can include travel expenses in your application budget as part of a research project, if the travel is directly related to and important for the project.

However, we do not consider applications that are only for travel expenses. I have a question that isn’t answered here. How do I contact you?

Please use our contact form. What do you mean by "societally beneficial"? Advanced AI is likely to transform society in many ways.

We are focused on ensuring that the large-scale consequences for humanity are beneficial. In practice, this means that we are especially excited about work that has a clear path to positive impact at a very large scale (see examples below), rather than narrower applications (such as coordination between autonomous vehicles, for example).

For example, this could include work on AI tools for collective decision-making that could demonstrably scale to vast populations, allowing deeper democratic engagement and consensus building, or technical research on how to avoid the most severe kinds of conflict involving AI systems (which are increasingly being used in high-stakes military situations). Who counts as an early-career researcher?

As a general guideline, postdoctoral researchers, PhD students and junior independent researchers could qualify for the early-career track. We expect most early-career applicants to apply within 2-3 years of completing their PhD (or to be at a similar career stage if they do not have a PhD), but we are open to receiving applications to this track from slightly more junior and slightly more senior researchers.

We will assess this on a case-by-case basis. Please also note that we also run a Cooperative AI PhD Fellowship that is specifically designed to support PhD students (see details of the 2025 fellowship here ). Thank you!

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Foundation Events Blog Resources Blog Contact The Cooperative AI Foundation is registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales under charity number 1201294, and incorporated as a company limited by guarantee established in England for charitable purposes only under company number 13485176. Its registered address is Courtenay House, Pynes Hill, Exeter, EX2 5AZ.