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.
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.
CAIF staff and trustees are not eligible for grant funding. Advisors, affiliates, and contractors of CAIF are eligible for grant funding. We will manage conflict of interests in accordance with our policies. Concretely, this means that external reviewers will play an important role in assessing such applications.
Our aim is to be able to cover all costs for completing accepted projects. This could include:
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.
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 on January 18th. 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.
Unfortunately, we do not expect to have the capacity to give feedback to applicants that are rejected in the pre-proposal stage.
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.
FAQs
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.
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.
Yes, we allow a maximum of 10% indirect costs. This should be calculated as 10% of the direct costs.
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.
We offer funding for universities in the form of grants (as opposed to unconditional gifts).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Please use our contact form.
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).
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).
