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Request for Proposals: Biosecurity

We think it’s likely that the coming years will see unprecedented progress in AI and biotechnology. While the ability of AI systems to improve human health could be transformative, some of the biggest risks to humanity may come from new biological threats such as mirror bacteria or viruses engineered with AI tools.

Our biosecurity team has awarded hundreds of millions in grants to date, and we expect to direct >$100 million this year.  Broadly speaking, we want to support work aimed at preventing engineered biological threats from emerging and improving our response to these threats should prevention fail. We believe that we need to make rapid progress to keep pace with the accelerating risks, and we’re eager to fund ambitious teams and individuals to move quickly on our priorities. 

To that end, we’re most interested in funding projects in the following categories:

  • Transmission suppression: Enhance society’s capacity to respond to global biological catastrophes (e.g. stockpiling PPE or developing transmission suppression technologies like air filters and disinfectant vapors)
  • Tech safeguards and governance: Reduce risks from advanced biological capabilities through technical safeguards and governance of high-risk technologies, particularly at the intersection of AI and biology (e.g. synthesis screening, misuse classifiers)
  • Policy and advocacy: Inform decisionmakers about risks and mitigations, support policymaking in key jurisdictions, and develop governance approaches for high-risk technologies (e.g. mirror bacteria)
  • Field-building: Build the field by attracting talented people to work on these problems and fast-tracking their path to impact (e.g. fellowships, events, accelerators, media)

We are inviting short expressions of interest (EOIs) for funding to support work in these areas. Submit an EOI here.

Applications will close on May 11 2026 at 11:59pm PT. The initial application is short (max 500 words) and designed to be quick to complete. We welcome applications from both new and previously funded teams and individuals — if you’re unsure whether your project is a fit, we encourage you to apply.

As this is a new initiative, we’re uncertain about the volume of interest. We aim to respond to all applicants by the end of June 2026. Selected projects will be invited to submit additional details to support a grant investigation. At this stage, we may also provide feedback and work with applicants to refine or adjust their proposals. We expect the full investigation process to take 1–2 months.

Examples of grants we’d be excited about in each category are described in more detail below. You can also hear our Managing Director, Andrew Snyder-Beattie, discuss some of our top priorities on a recent podcast appearance here or in his blog post on the ‘Four Pillars’ here. 

While the above areas cover our current priorities, we think it is likely that there are impactful grant opportunities that do not fall neatly within these categories. Therefore, we are open to other EOIs, though we expect they will be less likely to succeed by default. With that in mind, here are a few areas where we may still fund applications if we determine they are particularly aligned with our goals:

  • Enhanced intelligence capabilities to deter and deny bad actors (e.g. OSINT, microbial forensics)
  • Metagenomic sequencing-based detection and other pathogen-agnostic detection modalities
  • Diagnostics that are rapid, reconfigurable, and affordable
  • Ultraviolet germicidal irradiation
  • Resilience against agricultural threats (non-agricultural food production, food stockpiling)
  • Rapidly reconfigurable or pathogen-agnostic medical countermeasures

Separately, we are eager to fund career transitions through our Career Transition Development Funding program. If you are an individual who wants to transition to working in one of these areas, please apply here.

Categories of work we’re interested in

Transmission suppression: clean air and PPE

We’re interested in funding projects that can be deployed at scale to significantly reduce exposure to pathogens (especially airborne ones). Our goal is to build resilience to both respiratory pandemics and scenarios where pathogens are pervasive in the environment (e.g. mirror bacteria) through reducing pathogen inhalation by orders of magnitude. Promising projects could involve developing new tools or increasing the likelihood that existing transmission suppression technologies can be used on short notice (e.g. by strengthening the evidence base or by identifying scalable deployment strategies). We are particularly interested in cost-effective and highly scalable solutions for respiratory protection, air disinfection, and tools for verifying the efficacy of those solutions.

We’ve previously supported:

  • ProEquip, an organization working on stockpiling respiratory PPE for critical infrastructure workers
  • Blueprint Biosecurity, a nonprofit that develops and advances transmission suppression technologies, such as PPE, far-UVC, and glycol vapors 

Hypothetical, non-exhaustive list of example projects we might be interested in funding:

  • Testing methods to replace filters with common household textiles (e.g. making an effective Corsi-Rosenthal box without HVAC filters)
  • Developing a very cheap, open-source device to accurately monitor particle concentrations inside respirators
  • Gathering evidence on the ability of drug-free nasal sprays (e.g. hypertonic saline or carrageenan gum) to reduce viral load in the upper respiratory tract
  • Developing DIY-capable protocols to measure microbe concentration reductions from UV, glycols, or air filters in a space
  • Designing and testing easy-to-stockpile or easy-to-manufacture room air disinfectant units (e.g. an air freshener gel that can passively disinfect occupied spaces) in a variety of building types
  • Engaging philanthropists to support country-level PPE stockpiles for key workers

Tech safeguards and governance

We’re interested in funding projects that reduce the risk of terrorists, states, or AI agents acquiring powerful biological weapons.

In some cases, this involves governance of specific high-risk technologies like mirror life. More commonly, it involves efforts to reduce the risk of AI systems being used to help malicious groups develop biological weapons, whether by acting directly on AI systems themselves and or on relevant technologies (like nucleic acid synthesis). As AI capabilities advance rapidly, including in areas relevant to dual-use biology, there is an urgent need to evaluate dangerous capabilities, build safeguards, and develop institutional infrastructure before a serious incident occurs.

Among grants addressing AIxBio specifically, our primary focus is on projects that (1) generate rigorous AI evaluations credible enough to unambiguously prompt action if they trigger, and (2) develop and red-team safeguards that can help detect or deter misuse and remain robust even as AI coding capabilities advance.

We’ve previously supported:

Hypothetical example projects we might be interested in funding:

  • ‘Rule-in’ evaluations testing whether AI models can assist experts at novel dangerous pathogens — similar to recent studies done on LLM-assistance for novice performance 
  • An organization to regularly red-team whether a well-resourced group could circumvent current misuse safeguards by frontier AI companies, such as jailbreaks, know-your-customer, or access controls
  • Work to improve LLM classifiers’ ability to detect misuse, and other proposals to better distinguish between legitimate and harmful users, such as tiered access
  • Using AI to accelerate biosecurity defenses, such as patching vulnerabilities in DNA synthesis screening, know-your-customer policies, and other safeguards
  • Work to investigate whether safeguards could be put in place such that AI bioweapon capabilities become harder to distill or jailbreak than other safeguards
  • Empirical analysis of how quickly open-weight models are catching up on specific bioweapon capabilities, how large a role distillation plays, and how likely trends are to continue
  • Empirical analysis of whether specific biological datasets are genuine bottlenecks for dual-use capabilities in biological AI models or could be overcome via more powerful models and compute

Policy and advocacy

We’re interested in funding work that helps to educate policymakers and the public about risks and potential interventions in many of the areas listed above, and to help governments better prevent and prepare for biological catastrophe.

In this area, we have previously supported the Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund on their work with top scientists around the world to coordinate a response to the risks of mirror life, Blueprint Biosecurity’s 501(c)(4) arm and policy advocacy work, and more.  

Hypothetical example projects we might be interested in funding:

  • Work to increase policymakers’ awareness of catastrophic risks from the deliberate misuse of biology
  • Advocacy for government stockpiling of elastomeric respirators and other reusable PPE to protect vital workers in the event of a catastrophic biological event
  • Advocacy for comprehensive, enforceable gene synthesis screening regulations and know-your-customer laws in the US, EU, and other key jurisdictions
  • Development of legal and institutional frameworks for biosecurity threat reporting (analogous to models like NCMEC for combatting child exploitation)
  • Advocacy for sustained government funding of pathogen-agnostic detection infrastructure
  • Policy frameworks for governing mirror biology and dual-use AI in biology, and analysis of regulatory pathways for rapid deployment of transmission-suppression technologies in crises
  • International dialogues to foster governance to ensure mirror life remains out of reach
  • Approaches to communicate to broader audiences about the risks of mirror life (including policymakers, the public, scientists)
  • Advocacy for widespread deployment of portable air cleaners
  • Work on how to detect and disrupt bioterrorists 

Field-building

We’re interested in funding activities that help talented people from various backgrounds pursue work focused on addressing global catastrophic biological risks, support the work of those already in the field (e.g. via events that help build professional networks), or advance the public discourse around risks and opportunities in this space.

Outside of our Career Development and Transition Funding program, some examples of field-building initiatives we’ve funded in the past:

We think field-building activities are essential drivers of progress across the space. Hypothetical examples of programs we might be interested in funding: 

  • Incubator/co-founder matching program for high-priority biosecurity projects
  • Fellowship program at a top university that serves as a biosecurity “on-ramp” for computational biologists
  • Training program focused on discussing the risks of mirror life and understanding/developing policy solutions
  • Investigative article series at a reputable journalistic outlet
  • Biosecurity side-event/happy hour connected to a major conference in a related area, like microbiology or indoor air quality

Categories of work outside our core priorities

As previously mentioned, there are a few categories of work that we may be excited about but are not a core focus of our team.

If you believe you have outstanding ideas in the following categories that are targeted towards mitigating catastrophic biological risks, we encourage you to apply, but want to preface that we’re much less likely to fund proposals in these areas, and will likely only fund applications if we’re very excited about the theories of change or individuals involved.

These categories are:

  • Enhanced intelligence-gathering capabilities to deter and deny bad actors (e.g. OSINT, microbial forensics)
  • Metagenomic sequencing-based detection and other pathogen-agnostic detection modalities directed specifically toward early warning of engineered pathogen spread
  • Diagnostics that are rapid, reconfigurable, affordable, and quickly deployable in the event of a fast-spreading pandemic
  • Germicidal UV technology, such as 222nm far-UVC, for continuous air disinfection in occupied spaces
  • Resilience against threats to agriculture, particularly those that could threaten a total loss of agriculture (i.e. the depletion of most or all major crops). This could look like R&D on efficient non-agricultural food production or advocacy for countries to increase their standing food stockpiles
  • Pathogen-agnostic medical countermeasures, focused on rapidly reconfigurable platforms or fully generalizable methods that would be future-proof against adversarially engineered pathogens (e.g. vectored immunoprophylaxis, receptor decoys, etc.)

More information

Eligible proposals

We’re interested in funding a wide range of proposals, ranging from small grants for independently-led projects to multi-year grants to organizations. If you’re unsure whether your proposal is in-scope for this program, we encourage you to err on the side of applying. Submit an EOI here.

If you are an individual looking to make a career transition into biosecurity, please apply for funding through our Career Transition Development Funding program. In general, if we think your application is a better fit for another team’s funding program, we may redirect your application to them and will let you know if we do so.

Alternatively, if you are interested in potentially contributing to the field but aren’t yet ready to apply for a grant, please register your interest here.