Founding and Field-Building
This track is for prospective founders, field-builders, high-agency generalists, and general managers who want to launch new AI safety initiatives. Over 10 weeks (with a potential 6-12 month extension), fellows build and launch something new with weekly guidance from mentors who have done it themselves: founders, field-builders, sitting CEOs, and program directors.
- Initial application: Submit track-specific short response questions and references.
- Stream applications & follow-up: Apply to individual streams; follow-up is either an interview or an additional assessment depending on the stream.
We think AI safety needs to scale fast to ensure AI development and deployment goes well. At MATS, we are proud to have trained 10 cohorts of top researchers, but high-impact organizations are increasingly bottlenecked by management and scaling. There are more promising ideas than there are “general managers” to champion them, and available funding and capital are outpacing the capacity for deployment. We are launching the MATS Founding & Field-Building track to position to solve these bottlenecks and scale AI safety.
We want fellows who are driven, resourceful, and principled; who are motivated to do work that matters even when no-one is looking. There are three main pathways in this track:
- Founder: You are an experienced or fast-learning founder who wants to launch new AI safety initiatives in a high-talent, deep-research, mission-aligned environment. Our mentors have high-impact agendas in need of founders, or you can bring your own idea.
- Amplifier: You are a high-agency org-builder or generalist who wants to enter AI Safety for impact at an existing org as they scale or expand their reach with new projects.
- Field-Builder: You are a well-connected, high-context generalist who wants to own talent development and deployment initiatives within AI safety.
If you see yourself in any of these roles, we want you to apply!
Potential project inspiration from: Coefficient Giving 2025 Technical AI Safety RFP, Lizka Vaintrob & Owen Cotton-Barratt, Eric Ho, Marius Hobbhahn, Julian Hazell, Abbey Chaver, and Asya Bergal.
Founding ambitious AI safety and field-building projects.
Backing projects focused on product development and organization building in the areas of AI safety and alignment, biosecurity, and critical cybersecurity. Looking for fellows who are self starters, default to action, and have a desire to create.
Eleos AI Research is a nonprofit working to ensure the interests of AI systems are appropriately taken into account as we navigate transformative AI. We are looking for competent generalists to help scale up our AI welfare field-building by running high-impact events, or to otherwise amplify our research, communications, and operational capacity.
Forecasting, real world applications of world modeling with LLMs, formal & semiformal verification, capability evals design, coordination mechanisms, collective intelligence applications, or gradual disempowerment.