MATS Winter 2027
The Winter 2027 program will run for 12 weeks, from January 19th to April 10th, in Berkeley, CA and London, UK, with remote options also available. Fellows will receive mentorship from world-class researchers 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.
Applications closed on September 6th. Email applications@matsprogram.org with your resume to be considered for a late application.
Program phases
Key dates for the application and admissions timeline
Applications typically open several months before the program begins. Applicants complete a multi-stage admissions process, beginning with a general application. Depending on the tracks, streams, and mentors they apply to, applicants may also complete additional evaluations such as interviews, work tests, coding assessments, or writing samples before final admissions decisions are made. More information can be found on the apply page.
In Stage 1, applicants apply to one or more tracks (broad research areas): Empirical, Theory, Strategy & Forecasting, Policy & Governance, System Security, Biosecurity, and Founding & Field-Building. In Stage 2, 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 below or as a grid here.
Agent Foundations research focused on clarifying conditions under which humans can justifiably trust artificial intelligence systems. When should one boundedly rational learning-theoretic process come to trust another?
In my stream, I focus on empirically measuring how frontier AI changes human capabilities in biology and the implications of it for biological risk. I’m particularly interested in real-world evaluations, understanding what drives AI-enabled uplift, and developing simulations or other proxies that can be validated against physical experiments and used to rapidly assess new models.
TBD. Please check back later for details. Broadly speaking I'm open to a wide range of projects across AI policy and technical AI governance, and I'm open to pitches. Right now I'm sorting out some career plans that will affect the kinds of projects that I'd support.
We are interested in mentoring projects in AI forecasting, governance, and strategy. We want to improve the epistemic environment around thinking about AI risk by putting out concrete scenarios, exploring different dynamics and worlds that might happen, trying to forecast how things will go, and sometimes talking about how to deal with the risks. We hope that having better resources for thinking about the future will lead to better outcomes.
This stream works on the AI Village, where more than twenty frontier agents act in the real world over thousands of hours. Projects either mine the existing record of agent reasoning, messages and actions for new insight, or run new experiments in the Village to test hypotheses about multi-agent dynamics and real-world evaluation.
This stream will focus on field-building and research amplification, including headhunting and talent projects, ecosystem incentives such as large impact bounties, and operational work to scale an alignment research team.
This stream focuses on secret loyalties, where an LLM covertly tries to advance a principal's interests. Secret loyalties have been established as a pressing threat [1], and model organisms of narrow secret loyalties have been constructed and audited [2]. This stream aims to advance the empirical foundations of our understanding of secret loyalties. The goal being that humanity is well-equipped to deal with secret loyalty installation attempts as and when catastrophic secret loyalties become possible in the future.
We think being well-equipped looks like having sufficient security measures in place in frontier AI companies, understanding the dynamics and behaviours of secretly loyal AI systems, having effective auditing and verification protocols for secret loyalties and attempts to install them, and these protocols actually being followed by relevant stakeholders.
The Alignment Research Center is a small non-profit research group based in Berkeley, California, that is working on a systematic and theoretically grounded approach to mechanistically explaining neural network behavior. We are interested in fellows with a strong math background and mathematical maturity. If you'd be excited to work on the research direction described in this blog post – then we'd encourage you to apply!
The MATS Program is supported by a diverse and highly respected group of mentors — top-tier researchers, engineers, and thinkers working across AI alignment, governance, interpretability, and security.
Application
What are the key dates for MATS Winter 2027?
The timeline for the MATS Winter 2027 program is:
- Application final deadline: September 6th, 2026
- Evaluations: September, October and early November
- Offers sent: Early to mid-November
- Program dates: January 19th to April 10th. The Winter 2027 Program has a time commitment of 40 hours per week over 12 weeks and takes place in-person in Berkeley, CA and London, UK. Remote or part-time participation is a possibility depending on your circumstances and mentor.
- Extension phase: Possible 6 or 12-month extension for select fellows after the 12-week program, starting in December.
What if I am accepted by multiple streams?
Based on stream rankings of applicants and applicant rankings of streams, a final matching process uses both sides' rankings to send out a single offer.
How long does the application process take?
Stage 1 applications open on August 18th and close on September 6th, end of day anywhere on Earth. Offers go out in early to mid-November, and the program starts on January 19th.
Finances
What does “financial support” concretely entail?
MATS provides a stipend of $1600 per week for participation in the main program ($19,200 for the full 12-week program). Scholars who are participating and performing research for less than 40 hours/week and/or for less than 12 weeks will receive stipends proportional to their level of participation.
Separately from this stipend, MATS will provide scholars with travel to and from Berkeley or London, housing, office space, and lunch and dinner on weekdays.
Do I have to pay taxes on the grant I receive for the MATS Program?
MATS participants may have to pay taxes on their grants based on the rules of the countries in which they are a resident for tax purposes. The grants should be regarded as private grants from a non-profit entity provided to individuals for the purpose of independent research and participation in a US-based educational seminar program.