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Frontier AI Lab News Tracker ⇒
Neolab and Emerging AI Lab Tracker ⇒
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September 24, 2026 6:04 AM PT
Most writing about getting into frontier AI assumes you are already in the pipeline — a PhD student, a lab intern, someone with a referral. This page is for everyone else.
These are the structured entry points into frontier AI and AI safety research: programs that take applications from outside, pay a stipend or cover costs, and end with you having done real work. Several were designed specifically for career-changers, and most say plainly that no PhD and no prior ML publications are required.
Considerations for inclusion:
- Open to applicants from outside the lab and academic hiring pipelines
- A defined cohort, curriculum, or mentorship structure — not just a job posting
- Funded, or costs covered, or free to the participant
- Currently operating, with a named upcoming or recent cohort
A note on timing. As of early September 2026, most cohorts for the coming winter have already closed. That is normal and it is the single most useful thing to understand about this landscape: these programs run on annual or semi-annual cycles, and the application windows are short. Each entry below lists when applications typically open so the page stays useful between cycles. Nearly every program keeps an expression-of-interest form — so filling those out is the highest-value thing to do when nothing is open.
Research Programs | Research Organizations | Evaluators & Red-Teaming | Policy & Governance | Career-Changers | Funding | Courses | Directories & Community | Reading
Mentored research programs that produce a paper or a project, including the ones run by the labs themselves. The most common route from outside the field into a research role. A May 2026 LessWrong roadmap puts acceptance at the selective full-time programs around 3–10%, the part-time remote ones closer to 20%, and the Anthropic Fellows Program near 1.6% on 2,000+ applications.
• MATS — ML Alignment & Theory Scholars — https://www.matsprogram.org/ — Berkeley, USA & London, UK — The largest and best-known technical AI safety research program: a 12-week full-time research sprint with a mentor from a major lab, with an optional 6–12 month extension, that frequently converts into lab roles. Housing provided in Berkeley, housing stipend in London, catered meals, J1 visa sponsorship if needed.
➟ Apply: MATS 12.0 (Winter 2027) Application — cohort begins January 19, 2027
➟ Status: General applications closed September 6 — Neel Nanda's stream is still accepting late applications, with no closing date posted
➟ Stipend: $1,250 per week, plus $2,000 per week in compute
➟ Mentor guidance: Neel Nanda's MATS 12.0 application doc
• LASR Labs — https://www.lasrlabs.org/ — London, UK — A 13-week technical AI safety research programme where small teams take a project from conception through to publication, focused on concrete threat models and loss-of-control risk. Runs out of the London Initiative for Safe AI.
➟ Winter 2027 cohort: January 11 – April 9
➟ Status: Open — closes September 20, 2026, 23:59 GMT
➟ Stipend: £15,000, plus food, office space, and travel support
• ERA:AI Fellowship — https://erafellowship.org/ — Cambridge, UK — A 10-week in-person research fellowship on AI safety and governance, with mentorship, seminars, and a stipend. Open to any career stage with technical or domain expertise. Covers meals, transport, visas, and research expenses.
➟ Winter 2027 cohort: January 18 – March 26, 2027
➟ Status: Closed September 13, 2026 — join the mailing list for future programmes
• ARENA — Alignment Research Engineer Accelerator — https://www.arena.education/ — London, UK — A 4-5 week in-person technical bootcamp for engineers moving into alignment work. Less a research program than the skills on-ramp that makes the research programs accessible. The full curriculum is public on GitHub, so you can work through it on your own if you do not get a seat.
➟ Status: ARENA 9.0 (October 5 – November 6, 2026) is closed — expression of interest form open for future cohorts
➟ Cost: Fully covered — travel, visa expenses, accommodation, and meals
➟ Requires: Python proficiency and foundational linear algebra, calculus, and probability
• Astra Fellowship — https://www.constellation.org/programs/astra-fellowship — Berkeley, USA — A fully funded five-month in-person fellowship at Constellation for people transitioning into full-time AI safety work or founding organizations. Explicitly states that prior AI safety experience is not required.
➟ Status: January 2026 cohort closed — expression of interest form open for future cohorts
➟ Stipend: $8,400 per month, plus roughly $15,000 per month in compute budget for empirical research fellows
• Anthropic Fellows Program — https://alignment.anthropic.com/ — Remote / distributed — A four-month empirical AI safety research fellowship with weekly mentorship from Anthropic researchers. States directly: no PhD, no prior ML experience, and no published papers required — strong Python and technical problem-solving are what matter.
➟ Status: November 2026 cohort closed July 26 — watch the Anthropic job board for the next round
➟ Stipend: $3,850 per week (£2,310 GBP / $4,300 CAD), plus roughly $15,000 per month in compute
• Cohere Labs Scholars Program — https://cohere.com/research/scholars-program — Remote-first, no relocation required — A full-time paid annual cohort for emerging ML researchers, built around leading a research question through to publication. No prior publications or research experience required.
➟ Status: Closed — expected to open Fall 2026 for the January 2027 cohort
➟ Compensation: Full-time salaried
• Pivotal Research — https://www.pivotal-research.org/ — London, UK — A 10–15 week in-person fellowship across three tracks: policy & governance, technical governance, and technical safety. Prior experience not required. Also runs a Frontier Biodefense track.
➟ Status: Q3 2026 cohort closed May 3 — expression of interest form open for the next round
➟ Stipend: £6,000 – £8,000, plus travel and housing
• CBAI Research Fellowship — https://www.cbai.ai/ais-research-fellowship — Cambridge, USA — The Cambridge Boston Alignment Initiative's 10-week in-person fellowship, 30 fellows, with weekly mentorship across technical safety, governance, technical governance, and economics of transformative AI. For students, postdocs, and recent graduates transitioning into the field. Requires US work authorization.
➟ Fall 2026 cohort: October 13 – December 18
➟ Status: Closed September 6, 2026 — watch for spring
➟ Stipend: $15,000, plus housing, meals, workspace, and roughly $1,500 per week in compute
• CHAI Internship — https://humancompatible.ai/jobs — Berkeley, USA, remote possible — A 12–16 week supervised research project at UC Berkeley's Center for Human-Compatible AI, open to undergraduates through professionals with an ML or CS background. International applicants welcome with visa support.
➟ Status: 2026 internships closed — watch for 2027
➟ Stipend: $5,000 per month in-person, $3,500 per month remote
• Iliad Fellowship — https://www.iliad.ac/fellowship — SF Bay Area, USA or London, UK — A three-month full-time, in-person mentored research fellowship in applied mathematics for AI alignment. The route in for mathematicians, theoretical physicists, and theoretical computer scientists rather than ML engineers. For PhD students, postdocs, or researchers with equivalent experience. Three cohorts are running back to back.
➟ November cohort: November 2, 2026 – February 5, 2027 — closes September 21, 2026
➟ December cohort: December 1, 2026 – March 5, 2027 — closes October 19, 2026
➟ Funding: $6,000 per month travel-and-housing allowance
➟ Also runs: Iliad Intensive, a four-week introduction to technical alignment — next one November 2–27 in London, $5,000 support, closes September 28
• SPAR — Supervised Program for Alignment Research — https://www.sparai.org/ — Fully remote — A three-month part-time mentored research program run by Kairos, and the most accessible entry point on this page: remote, 5–40 hours a week depending on your availability, open to undergraduates through mid-career professionals, no prior research experience required. Nearly 30% of projects are policy rather than technical; the rest span safety, interpretability, security, and biosecurity. Ends in a virtual Demo Day attended by METR, Redwood Research, GovAI, and MATS.
➟ Status: Fall 2026 closed August 18 — Spring 2027 applications open around December
➟ Stipend: Unpaid; compute, API, and approved project expenses covered
• MARS — Mentorship and Research Support — http://caish.org/mars — Hybrid, one week in Cambridge, UK — The Cambridge AI Safety Hub's part-time programme: teams of 2–4 with a mentor, 14–18 weeks total including a one-week in-person sprint and 8–10 weeks remote. For early-career researchers and students, technical or governance.
➟ Status: 2026 cohort closed — next cohort December 2026, expression of interest form open
➟ Cost: Unpaid, but travel, accommodation, and meals for the sprint week covered, plus $2,000+ compute
• BASE Fellowship — Black in AI Safety and Ethics — https://www.baseresearch.org/base-fellowship-f26 — Fully remote — A 10-week part-time research fellowship for the Black diaspora and Global South, 10–15 hours a week, with weekly mentor check-ins and a capstone preprint or write-up. Fall 2026 tracks: catastrophic risk, biosecurity, AI governance, and responsible AI. Requires a completed or in-progress BA/BS. Also runs a separate ARENA-based technical training track.
➟ Fall 2026 cohort: October 5 – December 18
➟ Status: Closed — watch for spring 2027
➟ Stipend: Not stated
• PIBBSS Fellowship — https://princint.ai/fellowship — Cape Town, South Africa — A three-month in-person interdisciplinary fellowship, roughly 20 fellows, pairing researchers from mathematics, neuroscience, physics, philosophy, ecology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, economics, and the humanities with AI safety mentors. Wants PhD-level research ability or equivalent, but no formal credential; no prior AI safety experience needed. Run by Principles of Intelligence, formerly PIBBSS.
➟ Winter 2026-27 cohort: November 2026 – February 2027
➟ Status: Closed July 20 — expression of interest form open
➟ Stipend: $3,000 per month, plus accommodation and meals
• AI Safety Camp — https://www.aisafety.camp/ — Virtual, organized by timezone — A long-running volunteer-led research incubator for people who have moved past "AI risk matters" to a specific technical confusion of their own. Explicitly welcomes perspectives outside conventional AI safety framings.
➟ Commitment: At least 10 hours per week, weekend-weighted
➟ Status: Check site for the current round
• Apart Research — https://www.apartresearch.com/ — Online and in-person — Runs three-day open research sprints that anyone can join, then develops the strongest results into published work through the Apart Fellowship. The lowest-commitment way to find out whether you like this work, with 40+ publications and 5,000+ sprint participants behind it.
➟ Next sprint: AI Collusion Research Sprint, October 23–25, 2026
➟ Also runs: Seldon Accelerator, backing AI safety startups
• Algoverse AI Research — https://algoverseairesearch.org/ — Remote — A 12-week mentored research program aimed at publication, with mentors from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Stanford, and Berkeley. Two tracks: fundamental research including alignment, safety, interpretability, and evaluation; and applied research across biology, medicine, economics, and governance. Not safety-specific, but alumni have gone on to the Anthropic Fellows Program, and recent cohorts report 68–73% conference acceptance rates.
➟ Status: Rolling — extended to September 15, 2026, 11:59pm PT for the September 20 cohort
➟ Application: Five minutes; they look for technical signal from projects, coursework, or competitions
Research orgs that hire directly, on a rolling basis, with no cohort or application window. Several pay at or near frontier lab rates, and compute budgets are growing fast. This is where people go after the programs above.
• Active Site — https://activesite.org/ — Cambridge, USA — A 501(c)(3) measuring how much frontier AI actually uplifts biology work, through in-person wet-lab trials rather than benchmarks. Ran the largest and longest in-person randomized controlled trial in AIxBio, finding that novices with AI access cultured cells six days faster than those with internet access alone. Also evaluates AI agents on lab automation tasks.
➟ Careers and collaboration: info@activesite.org
➟ Note: one of the few places doing empirical, physical-world evaluation — relevant if your background is bench science rather than software
• AE Studio — https://ae.studio/ai-alignment — Los Angeles, USA & Florianópolis, Brazil — A for-profit product studio that funds and runs its own alignment research team: pretraining alignment, neuroscience-inspired approaches, empirical AI consciousness research, and alignment policy. Not a non-profit, but hiring on the same problems.
➟ https://ae.studio/careers
➟ Open now: Alignment Research Manager, Alignment Scientist/Engineer — both fully remote, US
➟ Status: Rolling — speculative applications welcomed for unlisted roles
➟ Twitter: @AEStudioLA
• Apollo Research — https://www.apolloresearch.ai/ — London, UK & San Francisco, USA — Technical research on scheming and loss-of-control risk, policy work, and an AI security product. Staff are based in one of the two offices and come in regularly.
➟ https://www.apolloresearch.ai/careers
➟ Status: Rolling — five-stage process, aims to have hires start within three months of applying
➟ Twitter: @ApolloResearch
• ARC — Alignment Research Center — https://www.alignment.org/ — Berkeley, USA — Theoretical work led by Paul Christiano on mechanistic explanations of neural network behavior: predicting what a network does from its weights rather than by sampling it.
➟ https://www.alignment.org/hiring/
➟ Open now: Chief of Staff, Automation Lead
➟ Researcher hiring: paused for summer, reopening September 2026 — expression of interest form open
➟ Entry point: Visiting researcher appointments, typically 10 weeks, available year-round
• AVERI — AI Verification and Evaluation Research Institute — https://www.averi.org/ — USA — A 501(c)(3) founded in early 2026 by Miles Brundage, formerly OpenAI's policy chief, to make third-party auditing of frontier AI effective and universal: pilot audits with leading developers, standards work, policy advocacy, and open-source auditing tools. Ran the first double-blind evaluation of a proprietary language model in 2026, with Google DeepMind, OpenMined, and MLCommons.
➟ https://www.averi.org/careers
➟ Status: No roles posted — inquiries to hello@averi.org
➟ Benefits listed: competitive salary, medical, 6% retirement contribution, unlimited PTO, and up to $22,200 a year for professional development
• Center for AI Safety — https://safe.ai/ — San Francisco, USA — Research, field-building, and advocacy on societal-scale AI risk. One of the few orgs here with substantial non-research roles.
➟ https://safe.ai/careers
➟ Status: No listings posted — inquiries to hiring@safe.ai, separate form for research collaborators
• Collective Intelligence Project — https://www.cip.org/ — Location not stated — Works on steering transformative AI through collective input: Weval, an open platform for democratizing AI evaluation; Global Dialogues, structured deliberation with thousands of people worldwide; community-built models; and alignment assemblies. The entry here for people who think the missing piece is whose values get encoded.
➟ https://www.cip.org/careers
➟ Status: No roles posted, but a general interest form is open — they name developers, AI researchers, technical writers, and UI/UX designers as who they want to hear from
• FAR.AI — https://far.ai/ — Berkeley, USA — Research on trustworthy and secure AI, plus the events, field-building programs, and FAR.Labs co-working space that connect the rest of this ecosystem.
➟ https://far.ai/careers
➟ Status: Check the careers page for current openings
➟ Twitter: @farairesearch
• Meridian Labs — https://meridianlabs.ai/ — Boston, USA — A 501(c)(3) building open-source tooling for frontier AI evaluation. Its Inspect AI framework is the standard used by the UK, US, EU, Japanese, and Korean AI safety institutes, and by METR, Apollo, Epoch, SecureBio, Redwood, and RAND — which makes it unusually high-leverage infrastructure work.
➟ https://meridianlabs.ai/careers
➟ Open now: Senior Front-End Engineer (5+ years), Principal Front-End Engineer, Principal Full-Stack Engineer (10+ years) — all Boston, TypeScript and React, building interfaces for AI researchers
➟ Note: A rare front-end route into AI safety; no ML background required
• METR — https://metr.org/ — Berkeley, USA — Measures whether and when AI systems could cause catastrophic harm: autonomous capability evaluations, monitoring evasion, embedded assessments. Posts salary bands openly, which almost no one else does.
➟ https://metr.org/careers
➟ Compensation: Member of Technical Staff roles $328,000 – $687,000; System Administrator $260,000 – $471,000
➟ Lower-barrier entry: Task Development Engineer, remote contractor, $150 – $300 per hour
➟ Status: Rolling — includes a take-home and a 1–2 day work trial in Berkeley; general expression-of-interest form open
• Parallax — https://parallx.ai/ — UK / EU, remote, London preferred — New in 2026: a non-profit research lab building the science of belief elicitation for white-box auditing of frontier agents — the beliefs, goals, and plans that shape behaviour in long-horizon evaluations. Founded by Mario Giulianelli (UCL, formerly UK AISI) and Gabriele Sarti (Northeastern, NDIF). A project of Meridian Impact CIC.
➟ https://parallx.ai/careers.html
➟ Founding Member of Technical Staff: $100,000 – $135,000 — closes September 27, 2026
➟ Founding Operations Manager: $60,000 – $90,000 — closes September 21, 2026
• Princeton HAL — Holistic Agent Leaderboard — https://hal.cs.princeton.edu/ — Princeton, USA — Not an employer but an open project: the standardized, cost-aware third-party leaderboard for evaluating AI agents, run by the Science of Agent Evaluation group under Princeton's Language and Intelligence Initiative, led by Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan. Evaluates agents across nine benchmarks on accuracy and cost, plus consistency, robustness, and safety through its Reliability Dashboard.
➟ How to get involved: contribute agents or benchmarks at github.com/princeton-pli/hal-harness — no application, and public work here is visible to everyone hiring in evals
• Redwood Research — https://www.redwoodresearch.org/ — Berkeley, USA — AI control research: how to get useful work from models that might be trying to subvert you. Points its own candidates toward MATS and Astra as the on-ramps.
➟ https://www.redwoodresearch.org/careers
➟ Compensation: Member of Technical Staff, $350,000 – $850,000 per year
➟ Status: Rolling — responses within about two weeks
➟ Twitter: @redwood_ai
• Resolution — https://resolution.org/ — Location not yet stated — New in June 2026: Timaeus merged with researchers from the UK AISI Alignment Team, launched as Sequent, and renamed Resolution the same month after finding a startup already using the name. Focus is scalable oversight and automation for higher confidence in alignment, with an Agent Foundations team on the theory side.
➟ https://resolution.org/careers
➟ Roles: Research Scientist (scalable oversight), Research Engineer (automation), Security Engineer
➟ Status: Rolling, but several rounds paused until roughly late October 2026. Has dropped London as a hub and expects new hires in person
• SecureBio — https://securebio.org/ — Cambridge, USA — A non-profit working to prevent catastrophic pandemics, with two program teams: Detection, on pathogen surveillance, and AI, on AI-enabled biosecurity tooling and evaluation. The clearest AI-and-biosecurity intersection on this page, and it hires for both research and operations.
➟ https://securebio.org/careers/
➟ Roles listed recently: Research Associate ($100,000 – $140,000), Genomic Biosecurity Scientist ($110,000 – $140,000), Infrastructure Engineer, Platform Engineer, IT Manager, Logistics Manager, and a Laboratory Operations Assistant described as an entry point into the field
➟ Status: Rolling, mostly in person in Cambridge; general applications welcomed
• Transluce — https://transluce.org/ — San Francisco, USA — A 501(c)(3) building "the public tech stack for scalable oversight of AI" — open tooling for understanding what models are actually doing.
➟ https://jobs.gem.com/transluce
➟ Status: Actively hiring — see the job board for current roles
• Truthful AI — https://truthful.ai/ — Berkeley, USA — Owain Evans's non-profit researching situational awareness, deception, and hidden reasoning in language models.
➟ https://truthful.ai/hiring/
➟ Status: No open roles yet — a hiring round is expected soon; register interest at contact@truthful.ai
• UK AI Security Institute — https://www.aisi.gov.uk/ — London, UK, with regional offices in Birmingham, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, Salford, and Bristol — The UK government's frontier AI research body inside the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Government pay, below the non-profits above, but the work is unusually consequential and it hires policy analysts and operators alongside researchers and engineers.
➟ https://www.aisi.gov.uk/careers
➟ Status: No open roles as of September 2026 — watch the page
• US Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) — https://www.nist.gov/caisi — Washington DC & San Francisco, USA — The US government's frontier AI evaluation body, inside NIST. Six teams: Agent Security, Applied Systems, Chem/Bio, Cyber, Frontier Assessment, and Partnerships. The US counterpart to UK AISI.
➟ https://www.nist.gov/caisi/careers-caisi
➟ Requires: US citizenship; in-person
➟ Status: All six teams "not hiring at this time" as of September 2026 — watch the page
The AI labs do not evaluate their own models alone. A whole commercial sector now runs third-party evaluations, red-teaming, and audits for them — and it hires differently from everything above: security backgrounds welcome, no cohort, no application window, and in several cases no application at all. If you want paid work in AI safety this week rather than next cycle, start with Gray Swan's Arena or Mercor. Neither asks for an AI safety background.
• Gray Swan — https://grayswan.ai/ — Pittsburgh, USA — An enterprise AI security company whose threat intelligence is used by Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Meta, and ByteDance before they ship. Runs the Arena, the largest open adversarial red-teaming network, plus weekly Proving Ground competitions and a research hub of 150+ tools and datasets.
➟ The Arena: app.grayswan.ai/arena — jailbreak anonymized models for cash. Prize pools have run $20,000 to $170,000+. Open worldwide, all skill levels, no coding required — most winning attacks are creative prompt engineering
➟ Why it matters: top performers are invited into Gray Swan's private red-teaming network for paid engagements with AI labs; 100+ people have been placed that way. UK AISI has run a joint challenge with them
➟ Careers: grayswan.ai/careers — hiring ML Engineers
• Mercor — https://www.mercor.com/experts/ — Remote, worldwide — Organizes domain experts to train and evaluate frontier models, partnered with the top five AI labs, paying out over $4 million a day across 300+ professional fields. Acquired Sepal AI in February 2026, adding expert-graded evaluation benchmarks and RL environments to what it does.
➟ How it works: build a profile, pass an adaptive AI interview in your own field, then take projects as they come — you are qualifying on the expertise you already have, not on AI experience
➟ Pay: $50 – $100+ per hour on hourly projects; task-based work up to $1,000 per deliverable, paid weekly
➟ Requires: usually undergraduate-level expertise, often professional experience or an advanced degree in the domain
• Irregular — https://www.irregular.com/ — Tel Aviv, Israel — Founded 2023 as Pattern Labs, renamed Irregular in September 2025; calls itself the first frontier AI security lab. Runs models through adversarial simulations probing antivirus evasion, autonomous offensive behaviour, and system infiltration. Its evaluations appear in OpenAI system cards, and its SOLVE framework is used by the UK government and Anthropic to assess cyber risk in Claude. Raised $80M.
➟ Open now: AI Researcher, Cyber Researcher, Research Engineer, Senior Software / Full-Stack / DevOps / SecOps Engineer, Technical Policy Researcher — plus an open "the role you are perfect for" application
➟ Contact: hello@irregular.com
• Alice (formerly ActiveFence) — https://alice.io/ — Israel & USA — Eight years of trust-and-safety work rebranded in 2026 around AI: pre-launch model stress-testing, runtime guardrails, and ongoing red-teaming and drift detection, backed by an adversarial intelligence engine called Rabbit Hole. Clients include Google, Anthropic, Meta, Amazon, TikTok, and Cohere. Raised $140M.
➟ https://alice.io/careers
➟ Note: the trust-and-safety heritage means real non-research roles — policy, threat intelligence, and operations alongside engineering
• Scale AI — SEAL — https://scale.com/research/ — San Francisco, USA — Scale's Safety, Evaluations and Alignment Lab builds evaluation benchmarks and red-teaming methodology, including Humanity's Last Exam, MASK, MultiChallenge, EnigmaEval, and FORTRESS, a set of expert-crafted adversarial prompts covering CBRNE, political violence, and financial crime. Has partnered with the US AI Safety Institute and contracted with the Department of Defense.
➟ Status: hires experienced ML researchers through Scale's main careers page; no separate external red-team pool advertised
• Faculty (Accenture) — https://faculty.ai/ — London, UK — Accenture's specialist AI business, acquired January 2026, and one of OpenAI's red-teaming partners. In September 2026 Anthropic and Accenture committed at least $2 billion over five years to embedded evaluation — independent evaluators working inside the lab with employee-level access — with Faculty leading the red-teaming, alignment assessments, and safeguard testing. The arrangement is non-exclusive; Anthropic is reportedly in talks with METR too. Currently one of the largest single employers of AI safety roles on this page.
➟ https://faculty.ai/en-gb/job-board — 69 open positions
➟ Dedicated AI safety research roles: Research Scientist, Senior Research Scientist, Senior Research Scientist (AI Safety Evaluations), and Technical Director of AI Safety
➟ National Security & Safety unit: 13 roles spanning Associate (Safety) at the entry end through Senior Data Scientist (Safety), plus frontend, full-stack, platform, and delivery-manager positions — several routes in that are not ML research
➟ Note: the safety data science roles ask for experience with Inspect AI, the Meridian Labs framework listed above. Government client work may require security clearance eligibility
• Dreadnode — https://dreadnode.io/ — AI infrastructure for the security stack: building, evaluating, and deploying security agents, with offensive-security evaluation as the core. Runs DreadIndex, which ranks models on offensive-security evals, and publishes research including AIRTBench and ScopeJudge.
➟ Status: no careers page on the site — contact directly or watch external job boards
• Frontier Design — https://www.imaginefrontier.com/ai-red-teaming — Alexandria, USA — Runs what it describes as the industry's largest human red-teaming evaluations for global technology companies, assessing national security risk in large language models. Recruits subject-matter experts in chemistry, biology, counter-terrorism, and operational security rather than ML people.
➟ How to participate: red-teamers are invited directly — enquiries and applications to olivia [at] fdg-llc.com
➟ Note: if your expertise is in a physical science or security discipline rather than AI, this is a route that wants exactly that
• Nemesys Insights — https://www.nemesysinsights.com/ — Albany, USA — A strategic analysis firm applying red-teaming, forecasting, and wargaming to adversarial problems. Its DART tool runs distributed asynchronous red-team exercises, and it has run a CBRN uplift study with nearly 800 participants, in partnership with Frontier Design.
➟ Status: exercises recruit participants periodically — enquiries to outreach@nemesysinsights.com
• Deloitte — https://www.deloitte.com/ — Washington DC area, USA — Acquired Gryphon Scientific in April 2024, bringing in a multidisciplinary team of scientists, programmers, and policy professionals working on biosecurity risk assessment and AI. Gryphon was an inaugural member of the US AI Safety Institute Consortium. The large-consultancy route into this work, with the scale and the government contracts that implies.
• Vaultis — https://www.vaultis.ai/ — Runs operational risk assessments of what emerging AI capabilities mean in the real world, including red-team exercises for misuse assessment, plus consulting and strategic advice. Small and lightly documented publicly.
➟ Status: no roles posted — enquiries to clucas@vaultis.ai
The non-technical pathways. These pay well, are less oversubscribed than the research programs, and actively want people with professional experience from other fields.
• GovAI — Centre for the Governance of AI — https://www.governance.ai/opportunities — Washington DC and London — Runs three-month winter and summer fellowships on both a research track and an applied track. The applied track is explicitly for communications, policy, operations, and program management professionals — rare and worth knowing about.
➟ Status: Winter 2027 cohorts (January 18 – April 9) closed — summer cycle follows
➟ Also runs: U.S. AI Policy Program, 12 weeks at 5 hours/week, free, for working policy professionals
• Horizon Fellowship — https://horizonpublicservice.org/fellowship/ — Washington DC — Places fully funded fellows inside host organizations working on AI and emerging technology policy, for 12 months at fellow level and renewable to 24. The best-compensated policy pathway on this page.
➟ Status: Closed — applications open annually around July and close around September
➟ Salary: $78,000 junior / $130,000 fellow / $190,000+ senior, plus $17,000 benefits stipend and relocation support
• IAPS AI Policy Fellowship — https://www.iaps.ai/fellowship — Washington DC or remote — A three-month fully funded fellowship on national security, procurement, export controls, and the geopolitics of AI, structured as a two-week DC residency followed by ten weeks of independent project work. Takes applicants from undergraduate through senior professional.
➟ Status: Closed — next cohort announced via newsletter
➟ Stipend: $15,000 fellows / $22,000 senior fellows, plus residency travel and accommodation
• RAND CAST Fellows Program — https://www.rand.org/global-and-emerging-risks/centers/ai-security-and-technology/fellows.html — Washington DC area, USA & UK — The RAND Center on AI, Security, and Technology's fellowship for policy analysts at the intersection of AI and security, with mentorship from RAND experts. Currently taking fellows in AI security, technology policy and governance, and biosecurity. Open to every level from undergraduate to mid-career, full- or part-time. The catch: you must be able to hold a US or UK government security clearance.
➟ Length: Six months to start, renewable up to three years
➟ Status: Rolling — applications reviewed quarterly
➟ Stipend: $40,000 – $200,000 for US fellows, plus health and dental; UK compensation by experience
• FAS AI Safety Policy Entrepreneurship Fellowship — https://fas.org/career/ai-safety-pef/ — Remote, with a California retreat and a DC capstone — The Federation of American Scientists' part-time fellowship: an average of five hours a week to develop and publish a policy memo on a frontier AI safety challenge, with an in-person retreat November 4–7 and a Washington capstone the week of February 22. Built for people with a day job.
➟ Cohort: September 30, 2026 – February 28, 2027
➟ Status: Closed September 7, 2026 — watch for the next round
➟ Stipend: $5,000, plus travel and a $1,000 merit award for the strongest memo
• Institute for Law & AI — Seasonal Fellowships — https://law-ai.org/seasonal-fellowships/ — Washington DC, Cambridge UK, or remote — Paid research fellowships at the leading edge of AI, law, and policy, for law students, practising lawyers, and academics. Prior AI-specific research experience is not required. Three tracks run across the year, one of them remote-first — rare for paid policy work.
➟ Winter Research Fellowship (EU Law): January 26 – May 8, 2027, Cambridge UK, in-person strongly encouraged — £1,000 per week, plus a £7,000 relocation and housing payment
➟ Summer Fellowship (US): June 14 – August 20, 2027, Washington DC — $2,000 per week, plus a $10,000 relocation and housing stipend. Closes January 29, 2027, 11:59pm ET
➟ Summer Research Fellowship (Legal Frontiers): 10 weeks, June 14 – August 20, 2027, remote-first, with a Convening Week in Washington DC June 21–25, travel and accommodation covered
➟ Check each track's own posting for its deadline — the winter cycle closes well before the summer one
• CAIS AI and Society Fellowship — https://safe.ai/fellowship — San Francisco, USA — A three-month in-person fellowship for scholars in economics, law, international relations, and adjacent fields, researching how advanced AI reshapes social, economic, and legal systems. Requires a PhD or JD, or equivalent research record.
➟ Status: 2026 cohort (June 1 – August 21) closed March 24 — watch for 2027
➟ Stipend: $25,000
• Tarbell Center for AI Journalism — https://tarbellcenter.org/ — Newsroom placements, various — Funds journalists covering AI, through fellowships with placements at NPR, MIT Technology Review, The Guardian, and USA Today, plus grants and senior residencies. The pathway for writers and communicators rather than researchers.
➟ Fellowship: $60,000–$80,000 early-career, $90,000–$110,000 senior
➟ Grants: $1,000–$20,000 for freelancers, staff reporters, and newsroom teams
➟ Residencies: $80,000 plus stipend, for senior journalists and editors
For generalists, managers, and mid-career professionals who are not going to become researchers. Field-building and operations are where the ecosystem says it is shortest on people.
• Generator Residency — https://generatorresidency.org/ — Berkeley, USA — A three-month in-person residency from Kairos and Constellation for "highly agentic, conscientious executors" from any background — technical, operations, policy, engineering, design, or writing — building infrastructure projects for the AI safety ecosystem, with placement support into full-time roles afterward. The first cohort, Summer 2026, took 27 residents from 1,500 applications.
➟ Stipend: $6,000 per month, with housing and travel covered; optional three-month extension
➟ Status: Summer 2026 closed April 27 — next cohort not yet announced, expression of interest form open
• HIP Impact Accelerator Program — https://www.highimpactprofessionals.org/impact-accelerator-program — Virtual — A free six-week cohort program for experienced professionals, ideally 5+ years in, who want to move into high-impact work including AI safety: weekly small-group sessions, a guided workbook, 1:1 support, and an alumni network. New in 2026: an entrepreneurship track.
➟ Status: Autumn 2026 open — closes September 20, 2026
➟ Cost: Free
• Global Challenges Project — https://www.globalchallengesproject.org/ — In-person, US and UK — Kairos's free three-day residential workshops on AI safety and biosecurity, about 30 attendees each, with 10+ guest speakers from the field. Travel, accommodation, and meals provided; $100 refundable deposit.
➟ Next: AI Safety Workshop, London, November 6–9, 2026 — for working professionals with 2+ years' experience — closes October 2, 2026
➟ Then: Further US and UK workshops from January 2027, rolling applications — register interest
• Pathfinder Fellowship — https://kairos-project.org/ — Remote — Kairos's fellowship for people building AI safety and policy groups at universities: funding, mentorship, and career support. Fall 2026 has 94 fellows at 73 universities across 17 countries. If you want to build a community rather than do research, this is the funded route.
• 80,000 Hours 1-1 Advising — https://80000hours.org/ — Remote — A free career call with an advisor who knows the field, to work out how your background transfers and what to do next.
• Probably Good — https://probablygood.org/ — Remote — Free 1:1 career advising, a career guide, workshops, and a job board. Similar in spirit to 80,000 Hours but across a broader range of cause areas, and a good second opinion.
A category of its own: money to start something, or to sustain yourself while you do the work.
• Project Tailwind — Coefficient Giving — https://coefficientgiving.org/tailwind/ — Launched September 2026 — Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) asked its AI safety grantmakers what they would fund if they could find a founder. The list passed 200 and was cut to 36 initiatives across seven areas: independent assessment, research institutions, evidence generation, AI security & verification, public goods, talent acceleration, and convenings. They are funding the people willing to take ownership of them.
➟ Pre-seed: $200,000 – $2 million to develop an idea and build a team
➟ Seed: $2 million – $20 million to launch and scale
➟ Scale: $20 million – $200 million+ for proven teams, or world-class teams starting fresh
➟ How it works: Submit an expression of interest saying who you are and what you would build. Promising candidates are invited to propose; especially strong ones go straight to a pitch meeting. No deadline posted — they aim to decide quickly and fund soon after
• BlueDot Rapid Grants — https://bluedot.org/programs/rapid-grants — $50 to $10,000 for concrete work: compute and API credits, events and meetups, research access, travel, community chapters, project tooling. Open to anyone starting work on AI safety or biosecurity. The application takes five minutes; they reply within a day on average and 9 in 10 applicants hear within a week, usually with money sent upfront. The fastest funding on this page.
➟ Status: Rolling, no deadline
➟ Also offers: Career Transition Grants, for a defined period working full-time on a move into AI safety or biosecurity
• Coefficient Giving — Career Development and Transition Funding — https://coefficientgiving.org/funds/global-catastrophic-risks-opportunities/career-development-and-transition-funding/ — The largest funder in AI safety, and the source of much of the money behind the programs on this page. Funds graduate study, unpaid internships, independent study, and transition periods at any career stage; rolling, reviewed in about six weeks. Note that Coefficient itself now directs people entering AI safety to BlueDot's grants above, which it funds.
No application, or a very low bar. Start here if the programs above look out of reach today.
• BlueDot Impact — https://bluedot.org/courses — Online, plus in-person programs — The standard on-ramp to the field. Their courses are the ones the rest of the ecosystem assumes you have done. The cohort courses are free on a pay-what-you-want basis, run intensive (about a week) or part-time (five to six weeks), and pair reading with a weekly two-hour discussion in groups of about eight.
➟ The Future of AI: 2 hours, free, self-paced, no application — finish it in an evening
➟ AGI Strategy: 25 hours, cohort-based — the recommended starting course — apply by October 4, 2026
➟ Technical AI Safety: ~30 hours, cohort-based, covering alignment and RLHF, mechanistic interpretability, evaluations and red-teaming, AI control, and scalable oversight; expects basic understanding of LLM training — apply by September 27, 2026
➟ Frontier AI Governance: ~30 hours, cohort-based, for engineers weighing policy work and for policy, legal, and journalism professionals; roughly 20–25% acceptance; AGI Strategy or equivalent expected first — apply by September 27, 2026
• Lens Academy — https://lensacademy.org/courses — Online, small groups — Free 25-hour courses on specific AI safety topics, run intensive (one week) or part-time (five weeks), each with a 1-1 advising call and a certificate. The AI Control course is the standout for anyone with a security background.
➟ Courses: AI Control, AI Futurism & Strategy, Compute Verification
➟ Status: Next cohort dates to be announced
• ML4Good — https://www.ml4good.org/ — Regional, in-person — Eight-day intensive bootcamps run regionally, on two tracks: a technical programme for engineers and CS graduates, and a governance and strategy programme for policy, legal, operations, and communications people. Free to participants.
➟ Cost: Food, accommodation, and teaching provided at no cost; travel reimbursed if it is a barrier
➟ Status: Check the site for the bootcamp nearest you
Where the roles are listed, including the non-research ones, and where the field talks to itself in public. Writing in the forums is one of the most direct ways to become visible before you have credentials.
• AISafety.com — https://aisafety.com/ — The most complete index of the field, and more thorough than this page by design: 502 job listings across research, policy, and operations, 109 training programs, 248 communities, 28 self-study courses, and a visual field map of 368 organizations and projects.
➟ Also offers: 27 advisors giving free 1-1 calls
• 80,000 Hours Job Board — https://jobs.80000hours.org/ — Hand-picked roles across research, policy, operations, and communications. The best starting point if you do not yet know which lane you belong in.
• Emerging Tech Policy Careers — https://emergingtechpolicy.org/areas/ai-policy/ — The Horizon Institute's guide to policy careers, and the policy-side counterpart to AISafety.com. Its AI section alone lists 24 AI policy fellowships, 40+ think tanks working on AI, federal agency profiles, congressional committee information, and a "how to get into AI policy" guide — considerably deeper on the policy lane than this page. The wider site adds 100+ guides on pathways and institutions, plus practical material on policy resumes, networking, and security clearances.
• AI Safety Talent Network — https://safetytalent.org/ — A matching platform rather than a listing: build a profile, and it matches you to AI safety roles, showing why you fit, where the gaps are, and what to do next.
• Glassdoor for AI Safety — https://gais-2-0.base44.app/ — Describes itself as "honest answers to what it's like to work at AI safety organisations, from the people who work there." The inside view the job boards above do not give you. New and lightly documented; builder not stated.
• AI Team Map — https://ai-team-map.vercel.app/ — Community-sourced notes on specific AI teams rather than companies, so you can compare, say, OpenAI Training against Anthropic's RL Engineering team before you apply. Twenty teams grounded in official sources — including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta FAIR, Google DeepMind Robotics, Cohere Labs, NVIDIA, and Microsoft Turing, alongside applied-AI teams at Airbnb, Stripe, Spotify, and others — plus community submissions, pairwise comparisons, and open questions. No login, reviewed before publication, and by its own note, anonymous does not mean employment-verified.
➟ Add a team or share an experience: about 30 seconds, one public source required
• AI Evaluator Forum — https://aievaluatorforum.org/ — A coalition setting shared standards for credible third-party AI evaluation, through the Independent Evaluation Standard (AEF-1) and an Evaluation Transparency Letter. Not a job board, but its member list is effectively a map of the independent evals sector — AVERI, Collective Intelligence Project, Meridian Labs, METR, Princeton HAL, RAND, SecureBio, and Transluce, all listed above — and evals is one of the more accessible technical lanes for people arriving from security or testing work. Open to new member organizations.
• The Safety Apprentice — https://safetyapprentice.com/ — An AI safety job guide aimed at people working out how to enter the field.
• alphaXiv Researcher Profiles — https://www.alphaxiv.org/researchers — Researcher profiles built from published work. Useful for identifying who is actually working on a problem you care about, and who to name in an application.
• LessWrong — https://www.lesswrong.com/ — The forum where a large share of AI safety thinking happens first. Program announcements, research write-ups, and career roadmaps all land here.
• Alignment Forum — https://www.alignmentforum.org/ — The research-focused sibling of LessWrong, specifically for alignment work.
• EA Global — https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ea-global/ — Conferences run by the Centre for Effective Altruism, always with substantial AI safety content. EA Global itself is for people already in the community; the EAGx and EA Summit events are built for newcomers. Much of the funding on this page traces back to this movement, so it is worth knowing the room exists even if you do not identify with it.
➟ Next EA Global: New York City, October 16–18, 2026; EAGx Oxford September 25–27
• AI Safety Nigeria — https://aisafetynigeria.com/ — Abuja, Nigeria — Research, training, and policy work on AI safety in Nigerian and African contexts, with virtual events and a paper reading group. Volunteer and partner routes in.
Written by people who did the hiring, or who made the transition themselves.
• Vlad Feinberg, How to Land a Frontier Lab Job
• Jack Morris, So you want to do AI research? It's true that no one really teaches you how.
• Neel Nanda, How To Become A Mechanistic Interpretability Researcher
• Neel Nanda, MATS 12.0 (Winter 2026-27)
• Mikhail Mironov, Roadmap Through AI Safety Programs for Early-Career Researchers
• Matt Beard, How to Get Into AI Safety in 3 Months
• Precious Oluwafemi Sani, AI Safety and Security From Scratch
Cohort dates, stipends, and application status were verified against each program's own site on September 15, 2026. Feel free to use this page as a starting point, but always confirm details with individual programs.
Updates welcome: cleverhack at duck.com
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The Great Frontier AI Lab Product War Is Just Beginning
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