Multilingual and Contextual AI Evaluation call for proposals: Fall 2026

The Multilingual and Contextual AI Evaluation call for proposals is a Fall 2026 round of the Amazon Research Awards. It asks academic institutions and nonprofits for work on multilingual AI evaluation, culturally contextual AI, or AI use in emerging markets. The page ties the call to Amazon's February 2026 commitment at the India AI Impact Summit to strengthen evaluation in underrepresented languages, with a focus on the Global South.

Selected principal investigators may receive unrestricted funds, no more than $50,000 USD on average, and AWS Promotional Credits, no more than $50,000 USD on average. They also get training, including AWS tutorials and hands on sessions with Amazon scientists and engineers. Awards are one time unrestricted gifts for a one year period. The budget should list expected costs in USD and should not include administrative overhead. The awards panel sets the final amount.

Topics include benchmarks and datasets for low resource languages, evaluation that accounts for local norms and safety, and studies of how AI is actually deployed in sectors such as healthcare, agriculture, education, financial services, and public administration. The page also welcomes data collection for underrepresented languages, community sourced evaluation, fairness and safety across languages, and evaluation capacity at institutions in the Global South. Proposals should say which datasets or benchmarks will be made public.

The principal investigator must be a full time faculty member at an accredited academic institution, or a permanent researcher at a non governmental organisation with recognised legal status equivalent to 501(c)(3) status in the United States. They must be at or above the age of majority. Each principal investigator may submit only one proposal to the Amazon Research Awards in this call period. Amazon employees cannot receive an award. The program is void in Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and the Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk regions of Ukraine.

The submission period is 1 October to 4 November 2026 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time. Decision letters go out in February 2027. Proposals should follow the proposal template and are encouraged to stay within 4 pages, not counting appendices. Submit through the call page. Amazon says it will weigh impact on multilingual evaluation, scientific rigor, feasibility, a plan to release datasets and tools in the open, and use of AWS AI and machine learning services.