Fellowships

The flagship alignment research fellowship. Scholars are matched with a mentor from a leading safety lab or research org and spend several months working on a focused alignment project. Based at Constellation in Berkeley. Highly competitive but one of the strongest signals you can have on your CV.

A fellowship program run out of Constellation for people working on reducing existential risk from AI. Astra provides funding, community, and mentorship to help fellows develop their research agendas and build connections in the safety field.

A Cambridge-based fellowship connecting researchers with the existential risk community. Fellows work on a focused research project with mentorship and access to the wider Cambridge safety ecosystem. Cohorts now run in both summer and winter.

A London research programme where small teams work on alignment projects aimed at producing a paper. Provides structure, mentorship, and a cohort of peers — one of the better ways to end up with something publishable to point at. Now runs twice a year.

A research fellowship bringing perspectives from outside machine learning — cognitive science, biology, physics, the social sciences — to bear on alignment. The most useful option on this page if your background is not ML, and one of the few that treats that as an asset rather than a gap.

A Cambridge-based research program focused on ML alignment. Provides a structured environment for researchers to work on alignment problems, with regular seminars and collaboration with the broader Cambridge safety community.

A free, structured course covering the landscape of AI safety — from technical alignment to governance. Includes weekly readings, discussion groups, and a final project. The most common starting point for people new to the field — completing it signals genuine engagement to fellowship reviewers.

A hands-on technical curriculum that takes you from ML fundamentals to alignment research engineering. Covers transformers, RLHF, interpretability, and more through structured exercises. Ideal if you have some coding experience but want to build the specific technical skills needed for alignment work.

An intensive research program that brings together aspiring alignment researchers from around the world to work on collaborative projects. Runs multiple times per year, with both in-person and remote components. One of the most accessible entry points — designed specifically for people making their first contributions to safety research.

Short, focused research sprints (often 1-2 weeks) on specific alignment topics. Lower commitment than a full fellowship — a good way to test whether alignment research is for you and to produce a concrete output you can point to in future applications.