Job description
Sentient Futures • Remote
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.
Apply by August 9 → See project proposals → Mentors from astro:end Who the incubator is for
Act under uncertainty
You start exploring before every question is answered, and let the evidence you find change your mind on the best path forwards.
Widen the moral circle
You take seriously the welfare of beings most people overlook: farmed fish and insects, wild animals at scale, and artificial minds we may soon create.
Work at the frontier
You're drawn to problems that are new enough that no one has the answer yet, where emerging technologies constantly change what’s possible.
Program details
Dates August 31 – November 9, 2026 · 10 weeks Format Remote independent project work, plus a weekly call with your mentor. Commitment 5+ hrs/weekHow it works
Browse
Explore the selection of mentors. Some mentors offer pre-defined projects to join, while others are open to mentee proposals. You can apply to up to three mentors.
Ideate
If you propose your own project, you'll 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, you'll work with your mentor to deliver a finished, standalone output. For a larger project, you will deliver a strong intermediate output with a clear plan to take it to completion.
Project proposals
Browse all 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 FischerRethink PrioritiesAI & 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 VeitUniversity of ReadingAI & 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 Qiumyrias.orgArtificial 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 ZiescheIndependentTech 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 BoddyAmbitious ImpactSelf-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.
Cause areas
astro:end
What comes next
The incubator gets you oriented and ships something real. What comes next is up to you.
Connections
We introduce fellows to collaborators and peers who can help move their projects forward.
Stakeholders
We connect fellows to organizations invested in their work, from potential employers to project partners.
Opportunities
We point fellows to grants, fellowships, and jobs that fit the projects they’re building.
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.”
“The incubator gave me space to do focused, applied data science on a real animal welfare intervention, with mentorship that took the work seriously. For someone trying to bridge technical skills and farmed animal advocacy, it is one of the few programs that actually closes that gap.”
“The Sentient Futures Project Incubator turned an early-stage idea about animal welfare in AI evaluation into a benchmark merged on UK AISI's Inspect Evals in three weeks, with frontier model results published and an academic collaboration with a tourism researcher in motion.”
“I built a functioning prototype that is now being shared with policymakers, and seeing what everyone else produced is honestly inspiring. ”
“ 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 Gätjens Educator & Animal Advocate astro:end