CLR Fellowship
About
The CLR Summer Research Fellowship is the flagship talent-development program of the Center on Long-Term Risk, a UK-registered charity (No. 1195079) headquartered in London. CLR was originally founded in 2013 as the Foundational Research Institute and rebranded to its current name in March 2020 when it relocated to London. The fellowship launched in 2020 and has run annually since, temporarily doubling the size of CLR's research team each summer. Fellows are embedded in CLR's research team for 8 weeks on a full-time basis, working on projects tied to CLR's core agendas. The primary current research focus is the Model Persona agenda, which aims to understand the conditions under which AI personas develop malicious traits — including spitefulness, sadism, and punitiveness — and to develop interventions that make AI systems robustly avoid such traits. Secondary areas include Safe Pareto Improvements in AI bargaining scenarios and s-risk macrostrategy. Fellows receive a monthly stipend of £4,925 plus reimbursement for relocation costs and productivity expenses. A paid research test at Stage 3 of the application process provides an additional £350. London-based participation is preferred; remote arrangements are negotiable. No formal qualifications are required; CLR looks for intellectual curiosity, independent thinking, and prior research experience with large language models for empirical roles. Historical cohort sizes have ranged from 9 to 14, with acceptance rates between 5% and 15% from applicant pools of 67-219. CLR states it is particularly encouraging of applications from women and minority candidates. Past fellows have gone on to full-time CLR research roles, PhD programs, positions at organizations including ARC and Redwood Research, and CLR Fund grants for independent research. One fellow's work was published at ICLR 2026 (Inoculation Prompting). The fellowship is funded through CLR's general operating budget, which is supported by Open Philanthropy, the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and Macroscopic Ventures.
Theory of Change
CLR believes that the most catastrophic outcomes from advanced AI involve scenarios not just of human extinction but of astronomical suffering — AI systems or AI-enabled actors that perpetuate extreme suffering at civilizational scale. The fellowship creates a pipeline of researchers who understand and are motivated to work on these neglected s-risk reduction strategies. By identifying talented researchers early, giving them hands-on experience on live research problems, and building a community oriented around s-risk and cooperative AI, CLR aims to grow the number of high-quality researchers working on these problems, directly increasing the probability that effective interventions are developed before transformative AI is deployed.
Details
- Start Date
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- End Date
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- Expected Duration
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- Funding Raised to Date
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- Last Updated
- Apr 3, 2026, 1:17 AM UTC
- Created
- Apr 3, 2026, 1:17 AM UTC