Support the Research
Help build open infrastructure for studying how society can communicate with AI systems.
Why Funding Matters
AIPolicy is an unfunded, independent research project. There is no venture capital, no corporate sponsor, and no institutional backing. The specification, the website, and all associated tooling are maintained through personal time and resources.
This works for early-stage research, but it limits what we can do. Sustained progress requires sustained resources. The costs are concrete:
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Infrastructure — servers, domain registration, hosting, CI/CD tooling, and monitoring for the specification website and validation services.
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Pilot programs — running controlled experiments with real websites to study how governance signals behave in production environments.
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Academic research — literature reviews, formal analysis, writing and submitting papers to peer-reviewed venues.
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Developer tooling — building and maintaining parsers, validators, SDKs, and reference implementations across multiple languages.
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Community building — documentation, onboarding materials, working group coordination, and public engagement.
None of these costs are extravagant. But they are real, and they accumulate.
Types of Support Welcome
We are open to multiple forms of support. Financial contributions are valuable, but they are not the only way to help this research move forward.
Research Grants
Funding from academic institutions, public research programs, or private foundations. Grants allow us to dedicate focused time to specification development, formal analysis, and experimental design.
Foundation Partnerships
Strategic alignment with organizations working on digital rights, AI governance, open standards, or internet infrastructure. Partnership means shared goals and coordinated effort, not control.
Compute Credits
Cloud resources for testing, benchmarking, and running experiments at scale. Governance signal research requires systematic testing across diverse configurations, and compute is often the bottleneck.
Engineering Time
Contributions to open-source tooling, parsers, validators, and reference implementations. If your organization has engineers interested in AI governance infrastructure, their time is one of the most valuable things you can offer.
Fellowships
Supporting individual researchers who want to dedicate sustained time to governance signal research, specification design, or empirical studies of AI system behavior.
What Supporters Receive
Supporting this research is not a transaction. There are no premium tiers, no gated features, and no paid access. However, supporters receive meaningful recognition and participation opportunities:
- Acknowledgement in publications and on the website, with the level of visibility agreed upon with each supporter.
- Early access to research reports, experimental results, and draft specification changes before public release.
- Advisory participation in research direction discussions. Input is welcome and taken seriously, though it is non-binding.
- Co-authorship opportunities on papers and reports where a supporter's contribution warrants it.
- Invitation to working group discussions and research calls.
Governance Guarantees
Research integrity is non-negotiable. The following principles apply to all forms of support, without exception.
No influence over the specification.
Funding does not buy editorial control, priority treatment, or the ability to shape policy outcomes. The specification is developed based on research findings, community input, and technical merit. Supporters have no special authority over its content.
Full transparency.
All funding sources are publicly disclosed on this website. There are no anonymous sponsors and no undisclosed financial relationships. Anyone can see who supports this research and at what level.
Research integrity.
Methodology and results are published regardless of whether they align with funder preferences. If the data contradicts a supporter's interests, the data wins. This is a foundational commitment.
Open by default.
All tools, datasets, publications, and specification documents remain openly accessible under permissive licenses. Support does not create proprietary advantages. What we build belongs to the commons.
Get in Touch
If you are interested in supporting this research — whether through funding, engineering time, or institutional partnership — we would welcome a conversation. Reach out through our contact page or email us directly at hello@aipolicy-spec.org.