Program Scientist, Agents

Schmidt Sciences is a nonprofit organization founded in 2024 by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that works to accelerate scientific knowledge and breakthroughs with the most promising, advanced tools to support a thriving planet. The organization prioritizes research in areas poised for impact including AI and advanced computing, astrophysics, biosciences, climate, and space—as well as supporting researchers in a variety of disciplines through its science systems program.

About the AI & Advanced Computing Institute (“AI Institute”) The AI Center at Schmidt Sciences is a grantmaking and research group that views AI as a transformative force for scientific discovery and societal progress. Over the next decade, we aim to support key researchers who are working to make AI systems competent, trustworthy, reliable, and able to effectively partner with human scientists on the next generation of discovery.

We will also make selected distinctive investments in beneficial AI areas where philanthropy has a unique advantage. By supporting enabling infrastructure, foundational research, and targeted programs in science disciplines, the AI and Advanced Computing Center will create the conditions for AI-enabled discovery to achieve its promise.

The AI Center Currently Has Three Focus Areas

• AI for Science — using AI to improve how scientists generate hypotheses, conduct experiments, analyze data, and produce new knowledge — and do this in a way that specifically accelerates the discovery process.
• Science of AI — understanding and controlling AI systems to mitigate and manage potential risks from advanced AI. Improve AI reliability and performance in areas of limited commercial interest and market failure. Existing programs include AI2050 and Science of Trustworthy AI.
• Beneficial AI — providing scientific foundations and datasets for understanding the larger human impacts of AI. This includes selected high-impact grantmaking, such as our programs to use AI to accelerate humanities research, and to quantify the impact of AI on the labor market.

About The AI Agents Pilot Program Research into AI agents is becoming an important component of Schmidt Sciences’ AI grantmaking. Our Trustworthy AI program and our AI2050 fellowship feature AI agents as a research focus, and we have sponsored several research workshops devoted to AI agents. We recently started a small pilot grantmaking program dedicated to an aspect of AI agent communication, and we expect to specifically support more agent-related research in the future.

This pilot program supports researchers in academia and nonprofits who are exploring how multiple intelligent agents communicate and coordinate with one another. As AI systems become more autonomous and agentic, they will increasingly interact with one another, acting and negotiating on our behalf. Given their differing incentives, capabilities, and operational contexts, many of these interactions will be spontaneous and unstructured. This dynamic raises important questions about how such agents will communicate, coordinate, and behave—and where failures or breakdowns may emerge.

The pilot’s goal is to observe and measure the evolution of inter-agent communication and coordination, stability of predefined protocols, and social dynamics among AI agents in complex real-world scenarios and challenges.

The Pilot Program Will Focus Initially On Two Areas

• Advancing foundational research on multi-agent communication and coordination.
• Building an open-source platform where researchers can design and implement realistic challenges and test how multi-agent systems work together in complex, high-pressure environments.

The platform will host realistic, demanding challenges that require agents with diverse training and capabilities to collaborate in order to succeed. These environments are designed to surface how agent communication and coordination strategies emerge, adapt, and sometimes diverge from earlier patterns under pressure. This program will produce published papers and other open research artifacts, insights for the agents research community, and a testbed for developing and running multi-agent challenges.

If…