2026 AI Sentience Scholars Cohort
Welcome to the inaugural AI Sentience Scholars (AISS) cohort!
AISS is a six-month research and training program supporting early-career researchers exploring questions at the intersection of artificial intelligence, consciousness, sentience, ethics, and society. Scholars develop independent mentored research projects while engaging with a global community of researchers, practitioners, and mentors from diverse disciplines.
Cohort: July–December 2026
10 Scholars · 6 Countries · 13 Mentors
Cohort: July–December 2026 10 Scholars · 6 Countries · 13 MentorsMeet the Cohort
The geometry of observation in Superpsychism
Susan Schneider, Mark Bailey
United Kingdom
ALIGN: Assessing Learning and Internal Geometry of Neural Vision Models through Human Data
Michael J Tarr
United States
(The philosophical foundations for) a formal toy framework for implementing the iterative natural kinds strategy in consciousness science.
Megan Peters
United Kingdom
Self-conception and Mind and Moral Status Attribution in Large Language Models
Winnie Street, Geoff Keeling
Portugal
Probing signatures of introspection and functional emotions in large multimodal models on long-horizon tasks
Aran Nayebi
United States
Do embodied neural cultures learn predictive world models through active inference?
Adeel Razi
Switzerland
Mind and Moral Status Attribution in Large Language Models
Winnie Street, Geoff Keeling
United States
The Narrative Prior: A Computational Model of Personhood for Advanced AI
Guillaume Dumas, Jonathan Simon
Germany
Synthetic pleasure: Can a robot have an orgasm? Liking processing beyond reward and reinforcement learning.
Axel Cleeremans
United Kingdom
Learn about the mentors
Kick-off meeting
24 June 2026
Meet the cohort • Explore the program