OpenAI's AI and Mental Health Grant Program 2026 (Up To $100,000)

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Applications are open for OpenAI AI and Mental Health Grant Program 2026. OpenAI’s AI and Mental Health Grant Program aims to support research proposals that examine the intersection of AI and mental health. As AI becomes more capable and ubiquitous, they know that people will increasingly use it in more personal areas of their lives.

OpenAI continues to strengthen how its models recognize and respond to signs of mental and emotional distress. Working closely with leading experts, they have trained their models⁠ to respond more appropriately during sensitive conversations and have shared detailed updates on how those improvements are performing. While they have made meaningful progress on their own models and interventions, this remains an emerging area of research across the industry.

As part of a broader safety investment, OpenAI is opening a call for research submissions to support independent researchers outside of OpenAI, helping to spark new ideas, deepen understanding, and accelerate innovation across the ecosystem. These grants are designed to support foundational work that strengthens both their own safety efforts and the wider field.

OpenAI’s AI and Mental Health Grant Program Focus Areas

Potential areas of interest include:

How expressions of distress, delusion, or other mental health-related language vary across cultures and languages, and how these differences affect detection or interpretation by AI systems
Perspectives from individuals with lived experience on what feels safe, supportive, or harmful when interacting with AI-powered chatbots
How mental healthcare providers currently use AI tools, including what is effective, what falls short, and where safety risks emerge
The potential of AI systems to promote healthy, pro-social behaviors and reduce harm
The robustness of existing AI model safeguards to vernacular, slang, and under-represented linguistic patterns—particularly in low-resource languages
How AI systems should adjust tone, style, and framing when responding to youth and adolescents to ensure that guidance feels age-appropriate, respectful, and accessible, with deliverables such as evaluation rubrics, style guidelines, or annotated examples of effective vs. ineffective phrasing across age groups
How stigma associated with mental illness may surface in language model recommendations or interaction styles
How AI systems interpret or respond to visual indicators related to body dysmorphia or eating disorders, including the creation of ethically collected, annotated multimodal datasets and evaluation tasks that capture common real-world patterns of distress
How AI systems can provide compassionate, sensitive support to individuals experiencing grief — helping them process loss, maintain connections, and access coping resources — along with deliverables such as exemplar response patterns, tone/style guidelines, or evaluation rubrics for assessing supportive grief-related interactions.

Grants Details

OpenAi will award targeted research grants with proposed budgets between $5,000 and $100,000, totaling up to $2 million.
Allowable costs under this award include all reasonable and necessary direct and indirect costs incurred in the performance of the funded activities, consistent with the recipient’s institutional policies.

Eligibility Criteria for OpenAI’s AI and Mental Health Grant Program

Applicant must be 18 or older;
Affiliated with a research institution or organization, and/or significant experience with mental health;
They are seeking to fund research rather than for-profit initiatives, so they will not prioritize for-profit organizations at this time.