Research Internship, Advancing Agentic LLMs

Position: Research Internship, Advancing Open Agentic LLMs
Persons in these roles are expected to work from our offices in Seattle. On-site requirements vary based on position and team. If you have questions about on-site work arrangements for this role, please ask your recruiter.

* Compensation dependent on current degree enrollment.
Research Intern, Undergrad: $94,320 (Annually)
Research Intern, Masters: $106,110 (Annually)
Research Intern, PhD: $140,000 (Annually)

Who You Are:

Ai2 is seeking passionate, early-career researchers to join us for full-time research internships with us. Applicants should have a demonstrated interest in advancing the state of the art in large language model (LLM) based agents and associated environments. International candidates are welcome to apply. Pay is competitive, and visa sponsorship is available.

Ai2 Research Internship Information:

• Duration: 12 weeks
• Start date: Flexible
• Candidates: A PhD candidate or a master/undergraduate student with a strong research background

Please apply by December 15, 2025 at 11:00pm Pacific Time to be considered for our Spring/Summer 2026 internships.

Who We Are:

At Ai2, we are excited about developing large language models that can autonomously act in real-world environments to accomplish user goals. We are building frontier open agentic LLMs - models that can plan, reason, use tools and APIs, write code, and interact with complex, dynamic environments to solve long-horizon tasks safely and reliably. This work is part of Ai2's broader mission to make AI systems more capable, trustworthy, and beneficial to science and society, while also openly releasing artifacts and effective procedures to build such systems.

We are seeking ambitious, motivated interns to join a research effort focused on advancing the science of training and evaluating general purpose agentic models. Our work systematically explores how data synthesis, training objectives, and learning environments shape the emergence of generalizable and reliable agentic behavior, and how such behavior can be measured in a meaningful and reproducible manner.

You will be part of a team investigating fundamental questions in this space, such as:

What data, training strategies, and environments yield models that generalize across diverse agentic tasks?

Can we design challenging benchmarks and environments that capture complex multi-step tool use and other under explored aspects of agentic behavior?

How should models interleave thinking and tool use? Can they learn to reason efficiently while deciding when and how to act?

How can external memory help models tackle long-horizon reasoning and planning?

How can we train models to be safe, reliable, and controllable when used for agentic tasks?

Can we develop a theoretical understanding of agentic abilities and limits of LLMs and use it to guide agent development?

Your Next Challenge:

At Ai2, you will be working with world-class AI researchers and talented software engineers, who perform team-based, ambitious research, with a mandate to strive for big breakthroughs, not just incremental progress, in an exciting and interactive workplace. We encourage open collaborations and support students freely publishing papers based on their internship work.

As an Ai2 Research Intern, you will:

• be paired with a mentor and will participate directly in Ai2's groundbreaking work, including building state-of-the-art AI systems, developing challenging benchmarks, and conducting extensive experiments;
• have access to Ai2's compute resources, using our clusters of A100s and H100s; and
• have the opportunity to contribute to our larger projects such as OLMo and Asta.

To see more about our current, future, and past interns, check out the internship page on our website!

What You'll Need:

• Be pursuing PhD (or, in exceptional cases, MS or BS) in computer science or a related field.
• Have an interest in cutting-edge artificial intelligence research, in particular in building, evaluating, and understanding LLM based agents.

Physical Demands and Work Environment:

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this position. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the functions.

• Must be able to remain in a stationary position for long periods of time.
• The ability to communicate information and ideas so others will understand. Must be able to exchange accurate information in these situations.
• The ability to observe details at close range.
• Can work under deadlines.

A Little More About Ai2:

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence is a non-profit research institute in Seattle founded by Paul Allen. We have a beautiful office right on Lake Union; catered lunches; smart, friendly and helpful co-workers. We are right next to multiple mountain ranges, oceans, and forests, that make for a vibrant outdoor scene.

The core mission of Ai2 is to contribute to humanity through high-impact research in artificial intelligence. In…