Institute for AI Policy and Strategy (IAPS) AI Policy Fellowship

To apply for the IAPS AI Policy Fellowship, please click "Apply Now" to respond to the prompts in the application form. We ask that you spend no more than two (2) hours preparing your responses to the prompts.

Application Deadline: March 18, 2024, at the end of the day (11:59 PM) in US/Eastern (EST) time zone. 

Q&A Webinar: March 7, 2024, 14:00 in US/Eastern (EST) time zone. If you’d like, you can sign up here.
The webinar will be recorded and made available here.

Note Before Applying: We invite anyone who is interested in this role to apply, and will assess applications primarily based on anonymized prompt answers, so please ensure they represent your fit for the position well.  We will advance candidates to the next stages based on their quality of responses during our hiring process. Please do not include a cover letter, photograph, or headshot of yourself, or any personal information that is not relevant to the role for which you’re applying (including marital status, age, identity traits, etc.). Additionally, please do not ask our staff members involved in the hiring process to meet with you – to ensure fairness, we try to minimize these interactions, and requests for meetings with the hiring committee members during the process will be declined. 

Contact: Please email info@iaps.ai if you have any questions.

About the Fellowship

The IAPS AI Policy Fellowship will be a paid 3-month remote program with a two-week in-person component for 10 individuals to work on AI policy projects with a focus on the governance of frontier models, with the goal of building the skills and connections necessary to obtain a longer-term career in AI governance.

Dates and location. The fellowship will take place between July 8th and October 11th and can be performed from most countries. The program will be remote-first with a 2-week in-person period in Washington, DC, on July 8-19, where the fellows will meet the IAPS team and partner organizations, and settle on their projects.

Stipend and commitment. Each fellow will receive a $15,000 stipend (equivalent to $60,000 annualized) to work full-time on their fellowship project. Travel, accommodation and food costs for the period in Washington, DC will also be covered. Only in exceptional circumstances, we might consider part-time fellows.

Target audience. Anyone can apply to the fellowship. At the same time, we expect the most competitive candidates to be early- to mid-career professionals who want to pursue AI policy careers aimed at understanding and managing risks from advanced AI systems.

An international, remote-first organization. IAPS and our AI Policy Fellowship are remote-first, and we are excited to build a diverse, international cohort of fellows. Our staff hail from a wide range of countries, and we can legally hire in many places. Due to administrative and legal reasons, we are unable to hire in some locations, but this can vary substantially by individual circumstance, and we will follow up with you in case we have any limitations in hiring in your country. If you have questions about a specific country and whether we are able to hire there, please reach out to us at info@iaps.ai.

Key Responsibilities

Fellows will work on the supervisor’s agenda. We expect fellows to be well-positioned to do work such as providing research assistance, distilling policy ideas to key stakeholders (e.g., government agencies), and co-authoring research and policy pieces (e.g., policy briefs, reports, op-eds).

Fields of interest

Fellows’ work will be in one of IAPS’s focus areas:  

• Compute governance
• Policy & Standards (mainly US AI standards, regulations, and legislation)
• International governance & China (including, for example, EU AI standard-setting)

What We Are Looking For

Skills and Competencies

We’re seeking candidates with the ability to:

• Analyze AI policy research and developments, and to a lesser extent AI technical work
• Write in a professional style with clarity, making points in a clear and structured way
• Understand the importance of identifying actionable recommendations to reduce risk from AI and tie them to specific stakeholders
• Prioritize their time, communicate blockers proactively, and keep their supervisor in the loop
• Communicate clearly why they think what they do, referring to sources as needed and evaluating confidence in them
• Take into account the impact of their work as a crucial part of their decision-making process
• Willingness and ability to consider a further career in AI governance after their fellowship
• Comfort with remote work and asynchronous collaboration using technologies like G Suite (we're a remote-first organization with staff in multiple time zones)

Knowledge and Experience

• Some relevant knowledge in their workstream of choice. Examples include (but are not limited to) having one of the following:
  • Knowledge of relevant US agencies/departments and how they work, e.g. NIST, DoD
  • Knowledge of relevant policy in other countries and institutions working on AI (e.g., UK, France, Germany, EU, UN)
  • Understanding of the Chinese government and/or China-US relations
  • Understanding of semiconductor supply chains and export controls
  • Understanding of standard-setting institutions and procedures
  • Understanding of software engineering, hardware engineering, information security, and/or cybersecurity
  • Prior work in policy (not necessary for your policy work to have been on AI or in tech)
• This role is open to candidates with all levels of experience, though we expect candidates who are early or mid-career professionals with some work experience to be the best fits for this fellowship. 

What We Offer

• A $15,000 stipend (equivalent to $60,000 annualized) for full-time work (pro-rated for part-time work, if applicable). 
• Eligible travel, accommodation, and food costs for the period in Washington, DC. 
• Connections, skill-building, and educational opportunities to build towards a permanent AI policy career.
• Statutory benefits to employed Fellows in accordance with local labor laws (as opposed to other contractual arrangements).

Additional Information

• Extension requests: We generally cannot accommodate extension requests, but will try to accommodate requests that are made before the deadline and ask for three (3) days or less of extension. We cannot accommodate extension requests made on or after the application deadline, or are longer than three (3) days, and cannot accept late submissions to ensure fairness to other applicants.
• Language: Please submit all of your application materials in English and note that we require professional level English proficiency.
• Travel: Please note that traveling to Washington, DC for the 2-week kick-off period is an essential requirement for this position. We are only open to certain exceptional candidates that do not fulfill this requirement, so please indicate in your application if you are not able to meet this requirement.
• Accessibility: We’re committed to running an inclusive and accessible application process. We warmly invite you to reach out to info@iaps.ai with any questions or accessibility requests such as chat box use during interviews.
• Inclusivity and fairness:  IAPS is committed to building an inclusive, equitable, and supportive community for you to thrive and do your best work. We encourage everyone to apply regardless of your age, gender identity/expression, political identity, personal preferences, physical abilities, veteran status, neurodiversity, or any other background. 
  
   

About IAPS

The Institute for AI Policy and Strategy (IAPS) works to reduce risks related to the development & deployment of frontier AI systems. Our activities include:

1. Producing and sharing research that grounds concrete recommendations in strategic considerations.
2. Strengthening coordination and talent pipelines across the AI governance field.
3. Doing both deep research driven by our research agendas and rapid-turnaround outputs or briefings driven by decision-makers’ immediate needs.
4. Doing both public and nonpublic work. Across all our work, intellectual independence is a core value; we are nonpartisan and do not accept funding from for-profit organizations. Read more about our funding and intellectual independence policy here.
5. Bridging the technical and policy worlds. We have expertise on frontier models and the hardware underpinning them, and staff in San Francisco, DC, London, Oxford, and elsewhere.

We welcome you to review our database of published work here.