Opportunities 2026-08-15

A paid eight-week alignment fellowship closes on Monday — and it asks for no institution behind you

The AI Alignment Foundation, a US non-profit working with AE Studio, is accepting applications until 17 August, anywhere on Earth, for an eight-week full-time alignment research fellowship. It pays a $12,000 stipend in two instalments and provides cloud GPU access and API credits per team, a dedicated research manager, researchers to help set the research direction, a midpoint check-in with senior mentors, and travel to a demo day in Los Angeles, with a remote option. The stated aim is published output — LessWrong posts and papers. Interviews run 18 to 29 August and the programme starts on 8 September. The organisers say they welcome applicants at any career stage — recent PhDs, MSc students, self-taught researchers, and people moving into alignment from another field — but expect a solid machine learning background, the ability to run and debug experiments, and some prior independent research such as a thesis, paper or public write-up.

Why it mattersAlmost every paid route into safety research runs through a lab's hiring pipeline or a university department, and both filter on credentials before they look at the work. This one says out loud that it does not, pays enough to cover the eight weeks, and hands over the compute — usually the exact thing an independent researcher cannot get. It is small, and eight weeks is not a career. But it is a real door into a field that mostly does not have public doors, and the deadline is Monday, which is the only reason it is worth telling you today rather than next week.

✓ Verified · 2 sources

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A paid eight-week alignment fellowship closes on Monday — and it asks for no institution behind you

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