MATS Summer 2026
The Summer 2026 program will run from June through August. It will be largest MATS program to date with 120 fellows and 100 mentors. Fellows will be connected with mentors or organizational research groups, such as Anthropic's Alignment Science team, UK AISI, Redwood Research, ARC, and LawZero, to collaborate on a research project over the summer. Some fellows will be offered a 6+ month extension to continue this collaboration.
Applications are now open. Apply by June 7th.
Program phases
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.
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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.
We will continue working on black-box monitors for scheming in complex agentic settings, building on the success of the previous stream.
See here for details.
Mary Phuong
AI control focussed stream, probably running in-person in London.
Escalation risks from state perceptions of AI capability, AI-enabled targeting, AI-enabled decision manipulation, and the impact of AI integration into nuclear command and control.
This stream will focus on the science and development of model evaluations, especially monitorability and alignment evals.
Research papers (technical governance or ML) related to evaluating and mitigating dangerous AI capabilities, with a focus on what's actionable and relevant for AGI companies
I'm interested in empirical projects that improve our ability to evaluate model capabilities or enable to understand or evaluate model monitorability. An ideal project culminates in a research output (conference/Arxiv paper or research blogpost with artifacts).
Making society safe from AI doesn't just mean making safe AI: we're figuring out how to uplift human collective intelligence, manage a highly multiagent world, improve foresight and institutional competence, ideally learning how to make best positive use of frontier AI systems as we go. FLF has a small, sharp team of researchers with a wide network, and we're looking to nurture new and missing approaches to minimising large-scale risks while steering to a flourishing future.
Projects in this stream will be on AI welfare and moral status; more specifically, on what it takes to be a moral patient and how we can determine whether AI systems meet the conditions. I'm looking for applicants who have ideas about these topics and are motivated to explore them in more detail.
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.