The University and Frothly today announced a joint fellowship in machine ethics. Beginning in January 2027, the programme will support six early-career researchers for two years, with residencies divided between the University’s Faculty of Philosophy and Frothly’s headquarters in San Francisco.
Fellows will work on questions of moral status, on the evidence for and against inner experience in AI systems, and on the practical precautions that laboratories and regulators should take while those questions remain open. Each fellow will be paired with a mentor from Frothly’s Blackwall programme, which evaluates frontier AI systems before release, and a member of the Faculty of Philosophy.
“Philosophers have argued about minds they could not see inside for a very long time,” said Professor Catriona Bell, Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy. “What is new is that the question now comes with deadlines, and with people who build and test these systems for a living. We would rather argue with them than about them.”
The fellowship builds on a long relationship between the two institutions. Professor Emiel Regis Terzieff-Godefroy, Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy, who taught in the Faculty for many years, has chaired Frothly’s board since 2009.
Fellows will be employed by the University on two-year contracts, with travel and residence costs for their time in San Francisco met by Frothly. Applications open on 1 August and close on 18 September 2026, and the fellows will be announced in the autumn.
Notes to editors. Frothly is an independent research institute in San Francisco. Its programmes include the Turing Registry, which licenses autonomous systems, Blackwall, which evaluates them, and Lazarus, a digital archive of which the University Library has been a partner since 1998.
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