MATS Autumn 2026

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.

Program phases

Key dates for the application and admissions timeline

1. Applications

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.

Autumn 2026 Timeline:

2. Main Program
3. Extension Phase
4. Post-program

Autumn 2026 Streams

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.

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Mentorship structure
Desired fellow characteristics
Project selection process

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.

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Mentorship structure
Desired fellow characteristics
Project selection process

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.

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Mentorship structure
Desired fellow characteristics
Project selection process

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.

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Mentorship structure
Desired fellow characteristics
Project selection process

Founding ambitious AI safety and field-building projects.

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Mentorship structure
Desired fellow characteristics
Project selection process

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. 

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Mentorship structure
Desired fellow characteristics
Project selection process

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.

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Mentorship structure
Desired fellow characteristics
Project selection process

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.

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Mentorship structure
Desired fellow characteristics
Project selection process

Community at MATS

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.