Accelerating talent and organisations for mitigating risks from frontier AI
ERA accelerates talent, advances research and builds organisations working to understand and reduce risks from increasingly capable AI systems.
Our mission is to advance the scientific & policy breakthroughs to mitigate risks from frontier technologies.
Applications opening soon for the ERA:AI Fellowship
Our Portfolio
Over 5+ years, we have built a portfolio of programmes around some of the most important emerging fields for mitigating risks from frontier technologies. We accelerate talent, advance research, and strengthen the institutions for navigating the transition to a world with transformative AI via our events & programmes portfolio.
ERA:AI Fellowship
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Help mitigate risks from advanced AI
At ERA, we care about both pursuing technical and governance research to mitigate the risks posed by advanced AI systems. We hope to address the complex challenges that arise from increasingly capable AI, including averting uncontrolled emergence of artificial general intelligence (AGI), preserving human agency during increasing deployment of frontier AI models, and establishing policy safeguards on the research, development and deployment of frontier AI.
As a fellow, you will have the opportunity to work full-time on questions you believe are important, including projects which sit between established technical and policy research areas. Our mission underpins everything we do, and you will have real scope to contribute significantly to this work.
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Dates & Location
The next iteration of the Cambridge ERA:AI Fellowships will be held in Cambridge, UK, for 10-weeks starting in January 2027.
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Support
Fellows are paid a competitive stipend. We also provide meals during working hours, and cover transport, visas and lodging for the duration of the Fellowship.
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Our Fellows
We welcome talented individuals from around the world at any career stage, who are motivated to contribute to AI safety and governance research.
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The Programme
Fellows work on a research project, with mentorship provided by our network of expert mentors. We also typically host 30+ events over the fellowship in Cambridge.
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Build your research portfolio
During the fellowship, you will spend 10 weeks developing a substantive research project with support from an experienced mentor in your field. You will also receive dedicated research management support, access to a generous compute budget, and daily opportunities to discuss your work with other fellows and the community at the University of Cambridge. The confluence of such a strong technical x governance research community at ERA can substantially accelerate your research.
Research at ERA:AI
At ERA, we support research across the full stack of frontier AI governance & technical AI safety, mentored by researchers from a wide range of organisations from our institutional network across government, academia & industry, including University of Cambridge, UK AI Security Institute, Centre for the Governance of AI, RAND Corporation, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic & more.
Our three tracks include:
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Technical
As AI systems become more capable and more autonomous, understanding how they behave, identifying dangerous capabilities, and maintaining meaningful human oversight all become increasingly important.
We support research across evaluations, interpretability, robustness, alignment and control. Our fellows work on questions ranging from measuring and eliciting dangerous capabilities, to understanding model internals, designing robust safeguards, monitoring model behaviour, and developing techniques for controlling systems whose objectives may not be fully aligned with those of their operators. In doing so, they contribute directly to some of the central research and engineering challenges in frontier AI safety.
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Governance
As frontier AI systems become more capable, decisions about how they are developed, deployed and governed become increasingly consequential. Effective governance requires institutions that can understand rapidly changing risks, establish credible rules and safeguards, and coordinate internationally where risks and incentives cross national borders.
We support research which advances international cooperation, strengthens regulatory tools in key jurisdictions, and improves governance and accountability within frontier AI companies. Our fellows work on questions spanning regulatory design and implementation, frontier safety frameworks, corporate governance and international coordination, helping build the institutional capacity needed to govern advanced AI systems.
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TechGov
As frontier AI systems become more capable, effective governance increasingly depends on technical facts and infrastructure. Governments and other actors should be able to reliably measure capabilities, monitor deployed systems, or determine whether requirements are actually being followed. Technical AI governance asks how the technical substrate of AI can make governance more informed, precise and enforceable. At ERA,
We support research across compute governance, auditing, monitoring, hardware-enabled verification, and technical standards. Our fellows work on questions such as how regulators can identify systems that cross risk-relevant thresholds, how hardware and compute providers can enable privacy-preserving verification, etc.
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Develop lasting connections
During the ERA:AI fellowship, you will have the opportunity to spend a two and a half months cultivating deep and life-long connections with other fellows, full-time researchers, and the AI safety community in Cambridge by working alongside them.
Our dedicated Community Health Manager organises weekly community health events for strengthening the social connections between fellows and the wider Cambridge community. We very often hear about alumni who have stayed in touch years after their time at ERA!