Researchers
You study minds, welfare, or AI, and want your findings to turn into something more than a paper. Work closely with a mentor who has shipped a research project before, and leave with a finished artifact the field can pick up.
Project Incubator
A 10-week remote program that runs August 31 to November 9, 2026, pairing fellows with mentors to work on projects aimed at improving the welfare of future sentient beings, across animal welfare, artificial minds, and AI governance.
Who the incubator is for
Advocates & field-builders
You work in animal welfare and see the gaps from the inside. Build the tool, dataset, or brief your corner of the movement is missing, with a mentor who has built one before.
Builders & engineers
You've built and shipped software, and can see AI reshaping how animals are farmed, counted, and considered. 10 weeks with a mentor turns that instinct into a working project.
Program details
Dates
August 31 – November 9, 2026 · 10 weeks, remote
Eligibility
Open to all. Anyone committed to improving the future for sentient beings is welcome to apply.
Time Commitment
5–10 hrs/week: independent project work, plus a weekly call with your mentor.
How it works
Browse
Explore the selection of mentors. Some offer pre-defined projects to join, while others are open to mentoring fellows who propose their own ideas. You can apply to up to three mentors, so choose carefully.
Ideate
If proposing your own project, take time to develop an idea that's both feasible to execute and addresses a real need. Our brief ideation guide outlines the types of projects we're excited by, with sample ideas and funding paths.
Execute
Over 10 weeks, work with your mentor (weekly check-ins + independent work) to deliver a finished, standalone output (or, for larger efforts, a strong intermediate output with a clear plan to take it to completion).
Project proposals
Rethink Priorities' Moral Weight Project V2
There are several sub-projects associated with the second version of the Moral Weight Project. For instance, you might spend your time trying to find good proxies for differences in attentional bandwidth across species. Or you might think about how to compare the relative prudential value of various hedonic and non-hedonic goods. Or you might work on adapting the hierarchical Bayesian approach that we used for RP's Digital Consciousness Model to this current purpose.
Bob Fischer
Rethink Priorities
AI & the future of farmed animal welfare
Dr. Walter Veit is an award-winning philosopher, author, and lecturer. He authored over 100 academic publications as well as several books on the nature of consciousness, evolutionary theory, and how we can understand what goes on in the minds of other animals. He has travelled all over the world to speak about his research, meeting the Dalai Lama in India, bomb-sniffing Rats in Tanzania, mischievous corvids in Cambridge, and self-aware cleaner fish in Japan.
Walter Veit
University of Reading
AI & neglected farmed animals
Myrias is a global venture studio for animal welfare. Nonprofit or for-profit, we build whatever the problem needs and aim it at the largest, most neglected sources of suffering. The evidence sets our priorities, and the evidence points first to China, where more than half of the world's farm animals are raised. We are looking for a talent for researching new areas.
Shuang Qiu
myrias.org
Artificial sentience & digital minds research
Soenke Ziesche holds a PhD in Natural Sciences from the University of Hamburg, earned within the university’s doctoral programme in AI. He authored Digital Minds 1.0 - AI Welfare, Ethics, and Beyond and co-authored Considerations on the AI Endgame with Roman V. Yampolskiy. Since 2000, he has served with the United Nations, working at UN Headquarters in New York and on field missions in Palestine, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Sudan, Libya, South Sudan, Bangladesh, Maldives and India. While in Libya, he temporarily acted as the highest UN representative during the revolution in 2011. In Maldives, he also worked as Senior Researcher for AI at the Maldives National University, where he started his work on digital minds in 2018. He is a member of the UNESCO AI Ethics Experts without Borders Network.
Soenke Ziesche
Independent
Tech for farmed animal welfare
Co-founder of Shrimp Welfare Project, now running the animal welfare incubation programme at AIM. PhD in AI, with past work on AGI risk — so I care a lot about where emerging tech meets animal advocacy. As a mentor I'm at my best helping people turn a fuzzy idea into a concrete, well-scoped project.
Aaron Boddy
Ambitious Impact
Self-awareness in LLMs
- Developing further behavior-based tests for endogenous goals in LLMs.
- MechInterp investigations into the representations underlying apparent sandbagging and external cued increases in effort found in my recent research.
- Investigating the causal role of chain-of-thought it apparently more self-aware behaviors in reasoning models.
- Investigating the degree to which models maintain a persistent identity across contexts. One way to test this is to monitor pronoun usage, which has been linked to emerging self-awareness in children; when do models signal identification with whatever “part” they are playing with the user, vs their own identity as an AI?
- Human studies: Establish a gold standard for self-awareness metrics to compare AIs against.
- Conceptual: Build a better theoretical account of the components of self-awareness found in biology, and come up with other LLM-appropriate or architecture-agnostic paradigms to elicit self-awareness signatures.
Christopher Ackerman
Independent
Mentors from
Rethink PrioritiesUniversity of Readingmyrias.orgAmbitious ImpactWelfare Footprint InstituteVegan HacktivistsSentient FuturesGlobal ForumSapiens FirstConfidentialGoodBotAE StudioCambridge AI Safety HubMycelium / NYU CMEPUniversity of BristolZephara AI; Project AWAREMyriasBoston UniversityPrinceton UniversityVeripolAI Safety NigeriaDun and BradstreetVail Mountain School
Cause areas
What comes next
Finishing a project is the start, not the end. Where it’s useful, we help connect you to the people, organizations, and opportunities that fit what you’re working on.
People
We introduce you to potential collaborators, and to others with a stake in what you’re building.
Organizations
Some organizations in your field are hiring. Others want a stake in your work. We connect you to both.
Opportunities
Grants, fellowships, jobs: when one fits your project, we make sure you hear about it.
Down the line
It doesn’t end at week 10. When a relevant opportunity comes up later, we reach back out to fellows whose work stood out.
Meet our alumni
See past projects →I came in to help with someone else's book and left with my own project ideas, my own network, and a much clearer sense of where I might be able to make a difference.
Henrike GätjensIncubator Spring 2026 · Educator & Animal Advocate1 / 4