TL;DR:

We're excited to announce the seventh iteration of ARENA (Alignment Research Engineer Accelerator), a 4-5 week ML bootcamp with a focus on AI safety! Our mission is to provide talented individuals with the ML engineering skills, community, and confidence to contribute directly to technical AI safety. ARENA 7.0 will be running in-person from LISA from January 5th – February 6th, 2026 (the first week is an optional review of Neural Network Fundamentals).

Apply here to participate in ARENA before 11:59pm on Saturday October 18th, 2025 (anywhere on Earth).

Summary:

ARENA has been successfully run six times, with alumni going on to become MATS scholars, LASR participants and Pivotal participants; AI safety engineers at Apollo Research, METR, UK AISI, and even starting their own AI safety organisations!

This iteration will run from January 5th – February 6th, 2026 (the first week is an optional review of Neural Network Fundamentals) at the London Initiative for Safe AI (LISA) in Shoreditch, London. LISA houses AI safety organisations (e.g., Apollo Research, BlueDot Impact), several other AI safety researcher development programmes (e.g., LASR Labs, PIBBSS, Pivotal, Catalyze Impact), and many individual researchers (independent and externally affiliated).

Being situated at LISA brings several benefits to participants, such as productive discussions about AI safety and different agendas, allowing participants to form a better picture of what working on AI safety can look like in practice, and offering chances for research collaborations post-ARENA.

The main goals of ARENA are to:

Find high-quality participants;
Upskill these talented participants in ML skills for AI safety work;
Integrate participants with the existing AI safety community;
Accelerate participants’ career transition into AI safety.

The programme's structure will remain broadly the same as in ARENA 6.0, with a few minor additions (see below). For more information on the ARENA 6.0 structure, see our website (soon to be updated with our new material).

Also, note that we have a Slack group designed to support the independent study of the material (join link here).

Outline of Content:

The 4-5 week programme will be structured as follows:

Chapter 0: Neural Network Fundamentals

Before getting into more advanced topics, we first cover the basics of deep learning, including basic machine learni...

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