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Science of Trustworthy AI is a program operated by Schmidt Sciences, the philanthropic research organization established by Eric and Wendy Schmidt in 2024 and headquartered in New York, NY. The program sits within Schmidt Sciences' AI and Advanced Computing center, which is directed by Mike Belinsky.

The program was formally announced in early 2025 with an initial $10 million commitment to fund 27 foundational AI safety science projects. Researchers in the first cohort included prominent figures such as Yoshua Bengio (Mila), Zico Kolter (Carnegie Mellon), and Arvind Narayanan (Princeton). A 2026 Request for Proposals was opened in February 2026 for a second cohort, with individual grants reaching up to $5M+ per project…

The program operates on the theory that frontier AI development currently resembles 'alchemy more than a mature science' · meaning that unsafe AI behaviors and failures are addressed in ad hoc ways that do not generalize. By funding basic research to build a rigorous science of AI evaluation and safety, the program aims to create measurement tools, interventions, and oversight frameworks that are robust across model families, capability regimes, and deployment contexts. The causal chain is: fund academic and nonprofit researchers to develop generalizable safety science → produce reliable evaluations and interventions → enable AI developers and policymakers to deploy frontier systems trustworthily → reduce the probability of catastrophic misalignment or misuse as AI capabilities increase.