GoKawiilArtificial intelligence is transforming grant writing. A new wave of AI tools, known as agents, can now generate a research grant application, review it and submit it.
AI agents are large language models (LLMs) equipped with tools that let them search the web, read documents, write and execute code, and call external services, for example. Given a goal, rather than a single prompt, they respond by planning a sequence of steps that they execute, evaluate and iterate until the goal is met — usually with little or no human intervention.
We need a new ethics for a world of AI agents
Agents can be trained on a researcher’s entire published body of work, on the grant criteria of the most relevant funding panel and on the texts of the most recently funded grants from that panel, all of which are often publicly available. They can produce tens of ideas, from which a researcher can select the best for the agent to work up into fully-formatted applications. All this can be done in minutes, and with little work by the researcher.
From a productivity perspective, this might sound exciting. But it could result in problems — and even herald the collapse of the grant-funding system as we know it.
In our roles as leaders of research and innovation institutions, we’ve both heard anecdotally from the dozens of funders that we work with that the volume of grant applications they receive has risen sharply. Meanwhile, the quality of proposals seems to have improved, making it harder to discriminate between them. We suspect that one reason for this change is the increasing use of AI models and agents by researchers to aid them in writing applications.
As the use of AI agents becomes more widespread among researchers, the scale of this challenge is likely to increase. Policymakers and funders will need to rethink how they allocate research funding before the system becomes unworkable.
Pump up the volume
To check whether this trend is real, we examined data on hundreds of thousands of grant applications from 12 multidisciplinary funders who work with the Research on Research Institute in London, which one of us (J.W.) heads. The funders are based in Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Spain, the United Kingdom and the European Union — and include the Australian Research Council, the European Research Council and the biomedical funding charity Wellcome in London. The types of application varied depending on the funder, and ranged from postdoctoral fellowships to targeted calls for research in specific fields (see Supplementary information).
All these funders saw increases in application numbers between 2022 and 2025 (see ‘Applications on the rise’), ranging from 14% for postdoctoral fellowship applications at the British Academy to 142% for EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellowships. Local issues explain some changes — shifts in the national funding environment, for example, or differences in the number of funding calls put out. But we think that the use of AI is also likely to have played a part since the chatbot ChatGPT was released in November 2022.
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