Deadline: June 30, 2026
Applications are open for the Vals AI Fellowship 2026. Vals builds evaluations for AI in legal, finance, science, and other high-stakes domains. They work with the leading AI labs and Fortune 500 companies, which means fellows get access to problems and infrastructure that are difficult to replicate in a university lab. Their goal is to develop better benchmarks, evaluation techniques, and ensure they are measuring what matters- as a fellow, you’ll be helping tackle some of these problems!
Fellows apply with a proposal for a new benchmark they want to build. If accepted, the fellowship is time and support to design, implement, and validate that benchmark. Some domains they are interested include:
- Long horizon agentic benchmarking in computer use or software engineering
- Cybersecurity
- Finance, law, insurance
- AI for Science evals- research-level mathematics, biology, materials science, theoretical physics, and more.
Benefits
- Stipend: $1,000-2,500 per week
- Compute: Unlimited API credits + budget capacity for GPUs and human data
- Mentorship: weekly 1:1s with a Vals research lead, plus regular access to the broader team
- Access: frontier model APIs, their internal evaluation infrastructure, and (where appropriate) real customer evaluation problems
- Workspace: desk in the San Francisco office (if you’re interested in being in-person)
- Network: intros to researchers across frontier labs
Eligibility
- Applicants should have preferred background in CS, ML, statistics, or an adjacent relevant field, although all applications will also be considered on the merit of the ideas and team.
- Genuine interest in evaluation as a research discipline, not just as a stepping stone.
- Comfortable working in a startup environment: faster iteration, less hand-holding, more direct contact with work that ends up mattering.
You don’t need to have published in ML venues specifically. Great evaluation work can come from measurement, psychometrics, statistics, HCI, and social science backgrounds. They ask fellows to be able to commit at least 20 hours per week during the fellowship. This can be done during a leave, over the summer, or during a flexible period of a PhD program.
Application
For more information, visit Vals Fellowship.
