TL;DR: We're running a residency in San Francisco for people who want to work on ambitious projects for the welfare of sentient beings, including animals and potentially sentient artificial minds. Housing, co-working, need-based stipends, and introductions across our network are covered. Summer 2026 cohort launching around mid-June, with a founding resident already in San Francisco. Fill out the Expression of Interest (10-15 min).
About Sentient Futures
Sentient Futures is an international field-building organization working at the intersection of AI, emerging technologies, and nonhuman welfare. We started as a volunteer project in early 2023, when this intersection was largely unexplored territory, and have grown into a team supporting a thriving ecosystem of researchers, advocates, and industry professionals working to reduce suffering for all sentient beings.
Most of our work is field-building: our Slack community of 1,500+ members, the AIxAnimals Fellowship, the Project Incubator, the Sentient Futures Summit, and our newsletter. We also take on direct work when the opportunity is right, like developing AnimalHarmBench, the first benchmark measuring risk of animal harm in LLM responses, and its successor AnimalHarmBench 2.0, which looks at the moral reasoning LLMs engage in.
The residency is our newest program and reflects a bet we're making: that being physically in San Francisco, embedded in the AI and frontier tech ecosystem, unlocks opportunities that can't be replicated remotely.
What this is
The Sentient Futures Residency brings motivated, high-agency people to San Francisco to work on projects that improve the welfare of sentient beings. Residents stay anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months, get embedded in our network, and work alongside the people building the early infrastructure for this field.
We cover housing, a co-working space, M-F lunch, and need-based stipends. Most importantly, we make the introductions: to AI labs, biotech founders, researchers, funders, and the people already working on the angles we think are most promising.
Why San Francisco, why now
Every day we spend in San Francisco, we find new opportunities to work with AI labs, biotech companies, and frontier tech orgs. We've been surprised by how many stakeholders are genuinely open to considering animals and other sentient beings in their work. Both the SF Standard and MIT Technology Review have recently covered this growing field.
Transformative technologies are developing fast. The opportunities we're seeing across this city far outpace our ability to act on them. We need more people going after them.
Examples of what you could work on
People in our network are already:
- Teaching AI models to reason about non-human minds
- Pursuing genetic interventions that could reduce suffering at enormous scale
- Building better benchmarks for how AI systems consider animals and artificial sentience
- Working on policy for autonomous vehicles and the ethical deployment of AI systems
None of this is hypothetical. We'd introduce you to the people behind these projects and many others across our network: founders, engineers, researchers, funders. You might collaborate on an existing initiative or use what you learn to launch something of your own.
Who should apply
You don't need to come from the animal welfare or artificial minds space. We're looking for high-agency people who can take an ambiguous, uncharted opportunity and shape it into something impactful.
If you've been waiting for a reason to spend a few weeks or months in San Francisco working on this, here it is.
Timeline
We're planning a summer 2026 launch, likely mid-June, though exact timing depends on when the strongest applicants can be in San Francisco. Our founding resident started on April 1, 2026, and we're already seeing what's possible when someone is fully embedded in this ecosystem. We'll reach out on a rolling basis as candidates are accepted and we have capacity.
Express interest
The EOI takes about 10-15 minutes. Submit it here!
Happy to answer questions in the comments.