Frothly–Oxenfurt Fellowship in Machine Ethics
From January 2027, six early-career researchers will spend two years between Oxenfurt and San Francisco, working on the moral status of AI systems.
The fellowship
- Partners
- Faculty of Philosophy and Frothly
- Fellows
- Six, for two years
- Begins
- 11 January 2027
- Director at Oxenfurt
- Dr Eleanor Haworth
- Residencies
- Oxenfurt and San Francisco, in alternate terms
What the fellows work on
Questions of moral status: the evidence for and against inner experience in AI systems, how anyone could tell, and the practical precautions that laboratories and regulators should take while those questions remain open. The fellowship was announced by the University and Frothly on 21 July 2026.
How it works
Fellows are employed by the University. They spend their first and third terms in the Faculty of Philosophy and their second and fourth at Frothly’s headquarters in San Francisco, where Frothly meets their travel and residence costs. Each is paired with a member of the Faculty and a mentor from Frothly’s Blackwall programme, which evaluates frontier AI systems before release.
The fellows
| Fellow | Project |
|---|---|
| Dr Chidinma Eze | How to act towards systems whose reports of experience cannot be checked, from precautionary reasoning about animals with uncertain sentience. |
| Dr Rui Antunes | What functional theories of consciousness predict, if anything, about large language models. |
| Dr Amelia Kerridge | What a regulator owes a system it cannot rule out being a subject. |
| Dr Kwabena Boateng | Whether a system’s reports about itself can ever count as evidence. |
| Dr Sophie Bergqvist | The ethics of retiring, deleting and copying systems, and which of those acts cannot be undone. |
| Dr Arjun Pillai | Indicator properties, and how an evaluator could audit them. |
The fellows take up their posts in January 2027, and their mentors will be announced then. Before arriving, they have been invited to comment on a draft of a forthcoming Blackwall report on moral status.
Contact
Dr Eleanor Haworth, Director at Oxenfurt · machine.ethics@oxenfurt.uk
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