The Cooperative AI PhD Fellowship is designed to provide future and current PhD students in the field of cooperative AI financial support to achieve their full potential. We provide a speedy review process and ask for a light-weight application from your side.
We are looking for early-stage career researchers, who are enrolled or are about to be enrolled in a PhD programme at an accredited university (anywhere in the world), with a specific interest in multi-agent/cooperation problems involving AI systems. Your research proposal should aim to contribute to societally beneficial AI development.
The Cooperative AI Foundation is committed to the growth of a diverse and inclusive research community, and we especially welcome applications from underrepresented backgrounds. This is the second iteration of the scholarship, and we're still refining how we can best provide value to PhD students. If you apply now, you can help us and future generations of students.
This round of PhD fellowships is designed for students who are currently enrolled in a PhD programme or aiming to start in 2026.
All selected fellows will receive:
In addition, a number of exceptional candidates will receive a scholarship with our maximum funding of up to $40,000 per year to cover living expenses. If you already receive a stipend for your living expenses, we provide top-up funding up to this amount.
Fellows’ benefits and scholarships have a maximum duration of three years, and are conditional on your continued work in cooperative AI.
The application deadline is 23:59 Anywhere on Earth on 16th November 2025. Please apply using this form. You will be asked to submit a CV, a two-page research proposal, two reference letters, and to respond to a few short questions. Your data will be processed in accordance with our privacy policy.
Applications will be reviewed by CAIF staff as well as external researchers, where required, in two stages: screening and full review. In a small number of cases, we may invite you to a brief call. We aim to communicate final decisions by the end of January 2026.
We are committed to fostering a culture of inclusion, and we encourage individuals with diverse backgrounds and experiences to apply, particularly from underrepresented groups. If you have specific needs or circumstances that require accommodation, please contact us.
Our primary criterion is the potential to conduct impactful, high-quality research in cooperative AI (related to both technical and governance aspects). As evidence of this potential, we evaluate applications on the strength of your research proposal as well as your experience and existing skill set.
Research proposals should:
You can see more information about this in the FAQ section.
As with our regular grantmaking, the following criteria will be central in our evaluation of your research proposal:
FAQs
- Applicants can be from any region.
- Applicants can apply to undertake their PhD at any department at an accredited university, as long as their research focuses on cooperative AI.
- Applicants with existing funding from other organisations can apply (see the question on “top-up” funding below).
- Applicants can apply before or after they are accepted to a PhD program, but scholarship awards are conditional on the applicant enrolling in a program in order to undertake the research outlined in their proposal.
We will need confirmation of your university enrolment and current living bursary (or lack of this) from your university. As a part of the due diligence process, we will contact your current/future university to verify the information you have provided. The successful candidates will be contacted and announced in January 2026.
We understand that it is natural for PhD students' research plans to evolve during their programs. CAIF will continue to renew your scholarship annually for a maximum of 3 years, as long as your research focus remains on cooperative AI, even if it does not exactly match your original research proposal.
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 believe that the most important cooperation failures occur when agents have different objectives. This means that we are significantly less likely to view work in the fully cooperative setting as scoring highly on impact, in terms of CAIF’s mission;
- We will generally not consider work on aligning one artificial agent to one principal (a human), even if that problem technically does consist of two agents;
- Please note that cooperative AI does not necessarily include work on helping humans cooperate to build AI – in short, our focus is on "AI for cooperation", not "cooperation for AI".
Yes! Please see the “Research Areas” part in our Research Grants page for examples of topics that we consider to be in scope. This list is not exhaustive, and if you want to work on a different topic falling under “multi-agent/cooperation problems”, you should not be put off from applying.
Yes, you can look at the “Technical and Methodological Guidelines” section in our Research Grants page for examples.
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).
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.
Yes.
No.
No, we do not have a nomination scheme. Please apply by yourself and provide two reference letters.
Your referees should submit their reference letters through this link.
By top-up funding, we mean that even if you are already receiving a living stipend, you can still receive funding from the Cooperative AI PhD Fellowship which would take your funding up to $40,000. For example, if you have a living stipend of $25,000, this scholarship would provide you with $15,000. We do this rather than provide every applicant with an identical lump sum to maximise the benefit of the programme in an equitable way. Applicants with a stipend or other scholarships totalling over $40,000 can still apply to benefit from the other support we provide.
For applications that are rejected in screening we will have limited ability to give feedback, but we might, for example, indicate if we think the proposal was out of scope. For applications that are rejected after going through our full review process we will attempt to provide at least a couple of sentences of feedback or reason for rejection. Our capacity to do this will depend on how many applications we receive.
Your application will be reviewed by CAIF staff as well as external researchers, where required. We do not share the identity of any reviewers with applicants. If you have any specific confidentiality concerns around your application there is a specific field in the application forms where you can let us know about this.
Yes, but you will receive your funding only when you are enrolled in a programme. The topic must be the same as the one you stated on your application.
You can reach out to us at fellowships@cooperativeai.org.
