Thinking Machines Lab — Interactivity Research Grants 2026
Thinking Machines Lab is awarding multiple $100K grants for research advancing AI interactivity — real-time multimodal interaction, generative UI, and human-in-the-loop agent steering. Apply by June 19, 2026 via email.
One of the few AI grants combining meaningful funding with compute credits — viable for independent researchers without large institutional backing.
Thinking Machines Lab — the AI research company founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati — is awarding multiple $100,000 research grants for work that advances AI interactivity. Each grant also includes $25,000 in Tinker credits (their model fine-tuning platform).
Research areas they’re excited about:
- Evaluations for real-time multimodal interaction — benchmarks for real-world real-time AI interaction quality
- Explaining complex information with generative UI — enabling AI to explain results via SVG, HTML, and other output formats so humans understand them
- Steering agents during long-horizon tasks — techniques for real-time human feedback and live steering of autonomous agents (training approaches + evals)
Not limited to these directions — any proposal advancing interactivity at scale is welcome.
What to submit (email to [email protected]):
- Research proposal (see apply page for full requirements)
- 1-page budget (institutional overhead ≤10% of cash grant)
- CVs of principal investigators and expected contributors
- Location and organisational details including tax ID
Deadline: June 19, 2026 at 11:59 PM PDT
Note: This grant was announced in mid-May 2026 — very new and not yet widely listed on grant aggregators. Verify the latest requirements directly at thinkingmachines.ai before submitting.