Mentor applications are now open for the Spring 2025 round of the Supervised Program for Alignment Research (SPAR), running from February 10th to May 17th, 2025.

SPAR is a remote-first part-time program that connects mentors and mentees for three-month AI safety and governance research projects. Mentor apps are due Nov 25th, and applications for mentees will run from December 15th to January 8th. If you’re interested in participating as a mentee, you can express interest here, and we’ll reach out once applications are open.

You can find out more about the program here. Starting this round, SPAR is being run by Kairos, a new AI safety fieldbuilding organization.

Should I apply as a mentor?

You might be a good fit to be a SPAR mentor if you are a graduate student, academic, full-time AI safety researcher, independent researcher, or have prior full-time relevant research experience (e.g., MATS, Astra, GovAI fellow, etc.). We’re interested in projects that cover technical AI safety, AI policy and governance, AI strategy, or AI security, and we are able to provide funding for compute costs.

Regarding dedication, we expect most mentors to dedicate 2–12 hours a week, depending on how many mentees they’d like to take in and how much supervision they’re interested in providing. Mentors can decide whether to run the project or not based on the applications they get, making proposals zero-commitment until they accept any mentees.