Could agentic AI topple grant-funding systems?

Artificial 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. …