Schmidt Sciences AI Interpretability Grants

Schmidt Sciences AI Interpretability Grants is sponsored by Schmidt Sciences. Funds methods to detect and steer deceptive behaviors in large language models.

AI Interpretability - Schmidt Sciences Back to AI & Advanced Computing Building the tools to better understand large language models. Cutting-edge AI models often function as black boxes, solving complicated problems through a reasoning process that is hidden within billions of artificial neurons.

This lack of interpretability fundamentally limits the trustworthiness of AI technologies, as it is difficult to validate the reasoning that produced any given AI output. This program aims to address this problem by supporting basic and applied research in AI interpretability.

This program focuses especially on understanding deceptive behaviors from AI models, including behaviors like excessive deference to users (sycophancy) and knowingly giving harmful advice to users. These problems are appearing more frequently in frontier AI systems, which are trained with noisy human feedback, and they are an ideal target for interpretability tools.

By inspecting what models are thinking, and not merely what they are saying, we will be able to better detect when humans are getting untrustworthy information from AI. This program will support researchers in academia and nonprofits working on interpretability. This competition will pit red teams against blue teams to answer the question: how can we detect when LLMs produce deceptive reasoning or communication?

The blinded design of the competition will force blue teams to show that interpretability tools work in practice, revealing deceptive behaviors that are not known about in advance. Outputs of the competition will include research papers.

Opportunities for Funding 2026 AI Interpretability RFP More AI & Advanced Computing programs and initiatives Science of Trustworthy AI Humanities and AI Virtual Institute The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes.

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