The Autumn 2026 program will run for 10 weeks in Berkeley, CA and London, UK from September 28th to December 4th. Fellows will receive mentorship from world-class researchers and at organizations like Anthropic, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Redwood Research, and ARC, with the option to apply for a 6–12 month funded extension beyond the main program. For the first time, we are running Founding & Field-Building and Biosecurity tracks.
Applications are now open. Apply by June 7th.

Key dates for the application and admissions timeline
General Application (May 12th to June 7th)
Applicants fill out a general application to individual tracks which should take 1-2 hours. Applications are due by June 7th EOD AOE.
Additional Evaluations (June 7th to late July)
After an initial evaluation, applicants will apply to individual streams listed below. Additionally, applicants undergo a variety of track specific evaluations including coding tests, writing reviews, work tests, and interviews. Which evaluations you will undergo depend on the tracks, streams and mentors you apply to.
Admissions Decisions (Late July to early August)
Selected applicants are notified of their acceptance and anticipated mentor later in the application cycle.

The main program takes place from September 28th to December 4th of 2026. It is an intensive research phase, where fellows work full time on a research project in AI alignment, security, field-building, or governance. Fellows' research directions will typically be chosen through a collaborative process with their mentors, and fellows are expected to develop their independent research direction as the program continues.
While mentor support will vary depending on the project and mentors, mentors are expected to spend at least 1 hour/week working with each of their scholars, and some spend much more time. Scholars will also receive support from MATS’s Research Management team, who help to scope out and structure research direction. Depending on which stream you participate in, you may collaborate with other fellows in your stream.
By the middle of the program, fellows will be expected to write a report on their projects’ threat model, theory of change, and project deliverables. At the end of the program scholars will be expected to have a tangible research output. In past cohorts, this has involved presenting at a fellow symposium on work conducted over the course of MATS.
Educational seminars and workshops will be held 2-3 times per week. Previously, speakers have included Buck Shlegeris from Redwood Research, Adam Gleave from FAR AI, Neel Nanda from Google DeepMind, William Saunders from OpenAI, Andrew Critch from CHAI, Lennart Heim from GovAI, Ajeya Cotra from Open Philanthropy, and more.
The extension phase starts in December of 2026, soon after the end of the main program. Fellows who demonstrate promise as independent researchers during the main program can apply for the MATS extension phase. Acceptance into the extension is based on mentor evaluation and MATS review of proposed research.
In recent cohorts, ~80% of fellows who apply have been accepted. The extension phase offers a default additional 6-months of funding, with the ability to later apply for a 6-month continuation.
Extension fellows primarily work from the MATS London or Berkeley offices, with the possibility of working from other AI safety hubs or fully remotely.For accepted extension fellows, MATS arranges funding for stipends and housing ($7,680/month), as well as for compute ($8,000/mo), creating a seamless transition into this advanced phase of the program.
MATS aims to accelerate researchers who will:
MATS alumni have gone on to publish safety research, join alignment organizations, including Anthropic and MIRI, and found an alignment research lab. You can read more about MATS alumni here.
In stage one, you apply to one or more tracks (broad research areas): Empirical, Theory, Strategy & Forecasting, Policy & Governance, System Security, Biosecurity, and Founding & Field-Building. In stage two, advancing applicants choose specific streams within those tracks, each led by one or more mentors with their own research agenda. You can view this list as a grid here.
Additional streams will be added over the course of May.
This mentor also has a stream in the Strategy and Forecasting track
This stream focuses on how advanced AI could enable new and dangerous bio technologies, and on assessing when risks become tractable or urgent as those capabilities arrive.
Half-hour one-on-one weekly meetings by default, with the option to extend or add ad-hoc calls when useful. I'm active on Slack and typically respond within a day for quick questions. I'm happy to read drafts and leave written feedback async between meetings.
Essential:
Preferred:
I'll talk with the fellow about what they're interested in, and we'll pick a broad area together from a few directions I'd want to pitch. From there we'll work together to scope something sharp and well-defined, with me leaning on my sense of what's tractable and high-value. The fellow then runs with the project, and we adjust as it develops.
This mentor also has a stream in the Biosecurity track.
This stream focuses on how advanced AI could enable new and dangerous physical technologies, and on assessing when risks become tractable or urgent as those capabilities arrive.
Half-hour one-on-one weekly meetings by default, with the option to extend or add ad-hoc calls when useful. I'm active on Slack and typically respond within a day for quick questions. I'm happy to read drafts and leave written feedback async between meetings.
Essential:
Preferred:
I'll talk with the fellow about what they're interested in, and we'll pick a broad area together from a few directions I'd want to pitch. From there we'll work together to scope something sharp and well-defined, with me leaning on my sense of what's tractable and high-value. The fellow then runs with the project, and we adjust as it develops.
I have two broad areas.
Security:
I am interested in building demonstrations for hacking real-world AI deployments to show that they are not secure. The goal is to force companies to invest in alignment techniques that can solve the underlying security issues.
Benchmarks:
I am interested in building benchmarks to determine how generalizable modern LLM techniques actually are, now that we are no longer in the pre-training scaling era.
I will meet 1-1 or as a group, depending on the interests as they relate to the projects. Slack communication outside of the 1-1.
I strongly prefer multiple short meetings over single long meetings, except at the start.
I'll help with research obstacles, including outside of meetings
For security:
You should have a strong security mindset, having demonstrated the willingness to be creative on this. I would like to see past demonstration of willingness to get your hands dirty and try many different systems.
For benchmarks:
As creative as possible, willingness to work on the nitty gritty, willingness to work really hard on problems other people fine boring. As interests as far away from SF-related interests as possible.
Mentor(s) will talk through project ideas with scholar
The stream focuses on evaluating and/or mitigating catastrophic risk emerging from dangerous scientific capabilities in frontier AI systems, with an emphasis on the challenges that emerge from lab integrations and novel science. Potential research directions include evaluation design, risk mitigations and evaluation science.
We can schedule a weekly 1h meeting, for general progress updates, share result and overall guidance. I would be reachable on Slack as well for async comms. Happy to jump on ad-hoc calls for specific discussions or pair coding/debugging. I am based in London and I work UK hours (10am-7pm), but I also visit the US (Boston) a few times a year.
Essential
Preferred
Not a good fit:
I will work with the fellow to find the right project that suits their interest within the directions spelled out above. I will pitch a few project ideas and support the fellow in making the decision. I also welcome project suggestions; in those cases I would work with the fellow to scope it appropriately.
Founding ambitious AI safety and field-building projects.
Minimum support = 2x 30-min meetings per week. We could scale this up as appropriate.
I'll be based in SF. If the fellows want to work in BlueDot's office for some periods of time, I could collaborate with them daily.
I'm available for quick calls anytime, and am responsive on Slack.
I'm open to people with a wide range of backgrounds. Though you need to be willing to work very hard, be great at communicating, and have a burning desire to make AI go well.
I work best with people who are intense, communicate and reason clearly, and are mission-driven.
We'll work together to design the project. You'll have a lot of freedom to figure out what the best shape of thing to do is, and I'll provide lots of regular feedback and make relevant introductions to help you refine the proposal.
Your first 1-2 weeks will be focused on figuring out what to do, and the rest of the fellowship will be focused on execution.
This is the empirical research stream of Eleos AI Research. We’re dedicated to understanding and addressing the potential wellbeing and moral status of AI systems. We are open to fellows working on a broad range of topics, including LLM introspection, LLM preferences, persona vectors, and more, using either white-box or black-box interpretability techniques.
By default, we will meet in person for at least an hour per week. We’ll communicate regularly on Slack between meetings, and I will often be able to hop on brief calls on short-notice to discuss time-sensitive, blocking issues.
Essential:
Strong advantages, but not strictly required:
Familiarity with existing research on AI well-being
We’ll meet at the start of the program to discuss ideas for projects aligned with Eleos’s research priorities, including any ideas that fellows would like to pitch. We’ll work together to select a project that best fits each fellow’s goals and skills.
This stream offers two broad projects focused on improving current detection efforts at SecureBio. The first is to characterize when AI-bio or general AI tools are actually useful for large-scale metagenomic detection, including tradeoffs between compute cost, sequencing cost, model type, model size, and pipeline stage. The second is to explore genomic language models as novelty detectors—for example, using perplexity-style metrics to flag surprising sequences—and to evaluate whether this approach can complement traditional bioinformatics systems in a cost-effective, sensitive, and interpretable way.
By default, we'll mostly collaborate via a standing weekly meeting (~1 hour), wherein we'll discuss recent progress and next directions. I'm available via Slack for quick back-and-forth on ideas, sanity checks, and unblocking (data access, etc.), but will rely on the fellow to manage their own implementations, code review, debugging, etc.
Essential:
Preferred:
Not a good fit:
I'll determine which of the two broad project ideas we're running with based on SecureBio Detection needs, which fellows match to me, etc. Within that broad project, I'll guide with what I think is helpful / interesting / relevant to SecureBio Detection, and I expect the fellow to have both autonomy and responsibility to pick concrete work directions.
Fourth Eon is developing adaptive, AI-native safeguards across the biotechnology stack, with a focus on function-based DNA synthesis screening. Fellows in this stream will work on technical research projects at the intersection of AI and biosecurity. Projects span topics like mechanistic interpretability of protein foundation models, bio model evaluations for biosecurity-relevant capabilities, and agentic sequence analysis workflows.
I typically schedule a standing weekly 1:1 meeting with each fellow, and also hold a weekly research group meeting. Beyond that I am available on Slack and can find additional time for calls outside of scheduled meetings.
Note that as part of our Safe and Responsible Research Framework we require fellows to sign a fellowship agreement covering confidentiality and pre-publication review for dual-use risks. This is common practice in biosecurity research and allows us to work freely together on sensitive material.
Required:
• Prior technical research experience
• Strong critical thinking and creative problem-solving abilities
• The integrity and judgment to responsibly carry out sensitive research
• A good understanding of the basics of biomolecular sequence, structure, and function
• Expertise in one or more of the following domains:
bioinformatics, computational biology, structural biology, biochemistry, molecular biophysics, protein engineering, biosecurity, AI/ML, or a related field
• Proficiency with Python
Preferred:
• Hands-on experience with testing biological AI models
• Have built model evaluations / benchmarks
• Experience with mechanistic interpretability techniques
• Biosecurity context awareness
Fellows who are interested in our research area should think of potential project ideas that leverage their strengths and interests. I will work individual fellows to identify a specific project that matches their background and interests and is aligned with our overall research direction, and to refine the scope and objectives of the project.
MATS Research phase provides scholars with a community of peers.

Scholars work out of a shared office and are supported by the Community Team.
MATS alumni report that the connections with peers that they made during MATS have had the largest impact on them years later. Our full-time Community Team works to facilitate these connections and also provide general well-being support. Weekly lightning talks, scholar-led discussion groups, game nights, and outings to SF are some examples of MATS events.