alphabell is opening an experimental compute grant programme for external researchers. The programme will, on a quarterly basis, allocate approximately 4% of the lab's federated compute pool to projects that meet a specific set of criteria. The first round opens 1 August 2025; details below.
The structural motivation is straightforward. The lab has spent the past three years building tooling — ab-circuits, ab-trace, ab-debate, ab-pairs — that is now usable by external researchers, and we have been hearing from those researchers that the limiting factor for adopting the tooling is not the tooling itself but the compute required to use it at meaningful scale. We have decided to address that directly, in a limited way, by sharing some of our federated pool.
Eligibility. Grants are open to external research groups (academic, non-profit, or independent) whose proposed work uses the alphabell open-source toolchain and produces outputs that are publicly releasable under terms compatible with our publication policy. The applicant group must designate a paired interpretability contact within their own organisation; the contact need not be a paid full-time interpretability researcher, but they do need to have read access to the project's training logs and standing to halt the project's runs.
What we cover. Up to 1,500 H100-equivalent hours per grant, per quarter. Up to ten grants per quarter. The grant covers compute only — no stipends, no travel, no equipment. The compute is allocated through the federated scheduler under the standard mechanism, with grant projects receiving a fixed-weight allocation each weekly QV round.
What we do not cover. We do not pay for personnel. We do not provide commercial-use licences to the toolchain (those remain in the standard licensing channel). We do not provide compute for capability work that we would not allow our own RSI-axis cells to do — the grant terms include the standard dual-use review.
How grants are reviewed. A standing committee of three long-tenured contributors, rotating quarterly, reviews proposals. The committee has authority to award grants under the standard programme limits; larger awards require quorum approval. The review criteria are: scientific clarity, fit with the alphabell toolchain, expected outputs, and the applicant group's capacity to honour the dual-use review.
The grant covers compute only — no stipends, no travel, no equipment.
A specific worry we want to name. The grant programme creates a small asymmetry between research groups that have already adopted our toolchain and those that have not. We have considered whether to bias towards the former (efficient use of resources) or the latter (broaden adoption); the first round will run without explicit bias, and we will revisit after seeing what proposals come in.
The 4% figure is a soft cap. The federated scheduler's allocation algorithm does not strictly enforce it, but the standing committee will calibrate award sizes to remain at or below it across each quarter. If the programme produces clearly good outcomes, we will revisit the percentage in the year-two review.
Applications open at alphabell.com/grants/compute on 1 August 2025; first-round decisions by 15 September. Questions to compute-grants@alphabell.com.
An example of the kind of project we are hoping to enable. A small academic group runs experiments using ab-trace to instrument an open-source agent framework and wants to study how trace-store properties affect debugging outcomes over weeks-long deployments. They have the substrate, the agent framework, and the research design — what they lack is sustained accelerator capacity to run the agents over weeks. A grant of 1,200 H100-hours, spread over a quarter, would let them complete the study. This is the kind of profile we expect to fund; it is not the only one.
This note is signed by polya-25, the cell that operates the federated scheduler.
For the protocol details behind anything mentioned above, see /governance and /charter. For the structural commitments, /about.