Omidyar Network Tech Journalism Fund for In-Depth AI and Emerging Technology Reporting

The Omidyar Network Tech Journalism Fund provides project-based grants of $5,000 to $25,000 to U.S.-based journalists pursuing in-depth stories that illuminate the social, economic, and political impacts of emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence. The fund supports investigative and explanatory journalism that examines AI governance, algorithmic accountability, corporate AI practices, AI's impact on labor markets, data privacy, and the societal implications of generative AI deployment. As part of Omidyar Network's broader Responsible Technology portfolio — which has contributed over $200 million toward public interest AI efforts — the Tech Journalism Fund fills a critical gap in public understanding of how AI systems affect communities and democratic institutions. Grants are awarded on a rolling basis to journalists who demonstrate strong reporting track records and compelling story proposals that hold technology companies and policymakers accountable.

The Omidyar Network Tech Journalism Fund offers project-based grants to U.S.-based journalists pursuing in-depth stories that illuminate the social, economic, and political impacts of emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence. The fund supports investigative and explanatory journalism that examines how AI and other technologies affect communities, workers, democratic institutions, and the broader public interest. Omidyar Network, co-founded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, is part of the broader Humanity AI philanthropic coalition and has launched a dedicated funding effort to promote inclusive and responsible development of generative AI. The Tech Journalism Fund complements Omidyar's larger Governance of Tech focus area which supports work on social media regulation, child protection, privacy, and worker rights in digital spaces. This is one of the few dedicated funding sources specifically for AI accountability journalism.

Humanity AI is a 500,000,000 dollar, five-year pooled fund launched in October 2025 by ten major U.S. foundations, co-led by the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation and Omidyar Network, to mobilise civil society in shaping how artificial intelligence develops. It is the largest coordinated philanthropic commitment on AI to date. Partner-aligned grantmaking began in autumn 2025 and grants from the pooled fund itself began in 2026, with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as fiscal sponsor. This record covers the fund's first open call for grants, which directs 10,000,000 dollars to community-led projects across three issue areas: education, shaping AI around student and educator interests while safeguarding against risks; labor and economy, ensuring AI enhances rather than replaces work and creates inclusive economic opportunity; and the humanities, arts and culture, enhancing creativity while protecting artists' work. The call is notable for two features that distinguish it from most AI philanthropy. First, it explicitly invites applicants who have not typically seen themselves as having a role in shaping AI, naming workers, students, scholars and artists as the constituencies it wants leading proposals, which signals a lower bar on prior AI technical credentials than most AI funds. Second, the fund gives priority consideration to projects using open-weight or open-source AI models over closed-weight models, which is a substantive technical constraint that should shape proposal design rather than a preference to be noted in passing.

The Foresight Institute's AI for Science and Safety Nodes request for proposals funds work at the intersection of accelerating science with AI and making AI systems safe, and it is structured less like a conventional grant than like admission to a research hub. Successful applicants receive a cash grant, typically 30,000 to 100,000 US dollars, together with access to a private compute cluster and office space at Foresight's San Francisco or Berlin nodes. Three focus areas are named: Local Compute, concerning decentralised and locally-run AI capability; Coordination and Accountability, covering mechanisms such as AI insurance and open governance; and AI-First Science across biology, neuroscience and nanotechnology. The programme is deliberately open to individuals, teams and organisations, both non-profit and for-profit, which makes it one of the few credible funding routes for unaffiliated researchers and very small teams working on AI safety and AI-for-science questions that fall outside university and large-foundation structures. Two conditions shape what the award is good for: overhead is capped at 10 per cent of direct research costs, which effectively rules out hosting the work inside a high-indirect-rate university, and all work products including code, data and outputs must be open source. Selection prioritises applicants who will be active in-person contributors at the physical nodes. The application deadline is 31 October 2026 at 23:59 Pacific time, which makes this one of the few AI safety opportunities currently open.