Call for Proposals: AI Accountability Grants

Call for Proposals: AI Accountability Grants

Focus Areas

• The focus of the AI Accountability Grants is to support work by organisations and coalitions that will contribute to building a system of accountability that addresses how AI affects people and society. 

Funding Information

• Grants will be between €10,000 and €200,000.

Eligible Activities

• Examples of work that could be funded:
  • Conducting research to identify provisions in labour and human rights laws that may provide a path to justice for communities harmed by algorithmic decisions in the workplace or when accessing welfare benefits.
  • Using transparency mechanisms to find evidence of AI harms that can be used in future campaigns, complaints, and legal cases.
  • Drafting and submitting complaints under EU regulations, such as the GDPR, that challenge the unlawful use of personal data for training AI systems, for example in healthcare.
  • Developing experimental litigation strategies to limit the harmful environmental impact of data centres, including pre-litigation research, evidence gathering and legal fees. 
  • Strategies to challenge corporate power through antitrust mechanisms, such as investigations by competition authorities or actions under the Digital Markets Act. This could involve research to provide evidence to regulators and cooperation with consumer bodies.
  • Preparation of complaints on high-risk systems, to be submitted under the AI Act once it is in force. 
  • Developing strategies to increase protections and close gaps where analysis shows that legal protections are missing, such as in policing and migration
  • Building coalitions and bridges to communities affected by AI harms and co-designing accountability strategies. 
  • Creating connections to specialists such as consumer movements, or technical, legal, standards or access to information fields to develop accountability strategies.

Ineligible Activities

• Policy and advocacy work focused solely on the implementation of the AI Act
• Work on technologies not connected to AI and its supply chain
• Public awareness raising campaigns that are not part of a wider accountability strategy
• Organisational capacity building outside of a wider accountability strategy
• Technology development, unless it is required for a specific need in an accountability strategy
• Accountability approaches for hypothetical future risks of Artificial General Intelligence and other speculative technologies that have not yet materialized.

Eligibility Criteria

• Organisations must be registered and carry out their work in one or more of the following geographies: EU, EEA, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Switzerland and the UK.
• If you want to apply in partnership with other organisations, please choose one lead applicant who represents the coalition in this process
• Organisations must have non-profit status
• These grants are not open to organisations who are current grantees and have an active funding agreement that runs beyond March 2025, if you are not sure whether that applies to you contact us.