Route 1 Tax Credit Program

The National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Pilot, led by NSF with DOE and 13 federal agencies alongside 28 industry and non-profit partners, allocates compute, datasets, pre-trained models and platforms to US researchers and educators who would otherwise be priced out of frontier-scale AI work. What distinguishes NAIRR from a straight GPU credit programme is breadth: the allocation can combine HPC time on DOE national laboratory systems, commercial cloud credits, curated AI-ready datasets and access to pre-trained models, matched to the project by resource matching committees after peer review. The call has no fixed closing date. It has been open since 6 May 2024 and runs until the end of the pilot or until all resources have been committed, operating on monthly review cycles in which proposals submitted by the 15th of a month are typically decided by the end of that month. Awards are for twelve months. Applications require a submission form plus a three-page PDF proposal, and a lighter Start-Up track with an approximately two-week turnaround exists for teams that need modest resources quickly or want to establish feasibility before requesting a larger allocation. Graduate students may apply with a support letter from a faculty advisor, which is unusual among federal compute programmes and makes NAIRR one of the few realistic routes to significant compute for a doctoral project.

Anthropic's AI for Science Program gives researchers Claude API credits rather than money, and the distinction determines whether it is useful to you: it removes the inference-cost barrier for projects that want to run large-scale LLM analysis, but funds no personnel, equipment or overhead. The award is up to 20,000 US dollars in API credits over a six-month window. The programme began with a focus on biology and life sciences, and that emphasis persists in the selection criteria, but eligible fields now span chemistry, medicine and healthcare, environmental science, physics, computer science, earth sciences and other areas with significant scientific impact potential - the August 2026 expansion explicitly widened the programme beyond the biological sciences. The review cadence is the most practical thing to know: applications are evaluated on the first Monday of each month, on a rolling basis with no annual deadline, and unsuccessful submissions do not receive individual responses. Evaluation weighs scientific merit, team credentials, potential impact, technical feasibility and a biosecurity screen, the last of which is a genuine filter for life-sciences proposals touching dual-use territory. Several restrictions are worth reading before applying: credits cover API use only and not the Claude consumer application, recipients do not gain access to non-standard or experimental models, and there is no exemption from the Usage Policy for red-teaming or jailbreaking research - safety researchers who need to probe model boundaries should not assume this programme grants that latitude. Alongside the credit programme, Anthropic opened 10,000 free and discounted Claude Team seats for scientists in August 2026, standard seats free and premium seats at 15 dollars per month with pricing fixed for a year, which is a separate and lower-barrier route to access.