Macroscopic Ventures AI Safety Cooperative AI and Digital Sentience Grants

The Cooperative AI Research Fellowship is a full-time three-month research program running from January to April 2026 in Cape Town South Africa. The fellowship brings together participants from diverse backgrounds to pursue AI safety research from a cooperative AI perspective. The program kicks off with a week-long retreat and provides mentorship from top researchers in cooperative AI from organizations such as Google DeepMind the University of Oxford and MIT. Participants receive resources for building their knowledge and network in cooperative AI with financial support covering living and travel expenses. Research topics include multi-agent cooperation problems AI coordination mechanisms cooperative game theory for AI systems preventing AI conflict through cooperative frameworks and developing norms and institutions for AI cooperation. The fellowship aims to diversify the AI safety research community by recruiting from non-traditional backgrounds and regions. This program is distinct from the Cooperative AI PhD Fellowship which provides multi-year funding for doctoral students and from the IAPS AI Policy Fellowship which focuses on policy rather than technical research.

CIFAR and the Canadian AI Safety Institute fund Catalyst Project proposals addressing sociotechnical considerations in AI safety. The program supports interdisciplinary research in machine learning applications to science and society, with recent funded projects spanning misinformation combat, trustworthy language models, democratic alignment of AI systems, Indigenous AI governance, and real-world safety in autonomous systems. Designed to catalyze new research areas and collaborations at the intersection of social sciences, humanities, and AI safety.

The Climate Change AI Innovation Grants program supports projects that address research and deployment challenges in climate change mitigation, adaptation, and climate science by leveraging AI and machine learning, while also creating publicly available datasets and tools to catalyze further work. The program enables key partnerships that accelerate the research-to-deployment cycle, creating synergies between academic researchers, nonprofits, startups and other companies, and governmental or intergovernmental organizations. Funded by the Quadrature Climate Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and Google DeepMind, with Future Earth serving as fiscal sponsor, this is one of the few dedicated grant programs specifically targeting the intersection of AI/ML and climate change. Projects typically involve climate modeling, weather prediction, emissions monitoring, energy optimization, biodiversity monitoring, and other environmental applications of machine learning. The 2026 competition opens with a full proposal deadline of September 15, 2026. The program has grown steadily since its inception, funding 23 projects to date across diverse climate domains and geographies.

Climate Change AI Innovation Grants provide seed funding for research, deployment, and the creation of datasets and tools that address climate change mitigation, adaptation, and climate science using AI and machine learning. Supported areas include power and energy systems, agriculture and food, climate science and modeling, weather prediction, ecosystems and biodiversity monitoring, remote sensing, disaster management, carbon capture, oceans, forests, and transportation. Projects are expected to produce publicly available datasets and tools.