John Templeton Foundation | Intelligence Venture

Call for Proposals: The Intelligence Venture

The John Templeton Foundation is launching its first Venture: a meta-portfolio of philanthropic investments that harnesses the resources and rich multi-disciplinarity of the Foundation to address one of the most urgent, important, and complex topics of our time: What is intelligence, what is it for, and what is its future?

As current science and scholarship yield a more subtle understanding of biological intelligence from cells to plants to animals, as complexity theorists illuminate collective intelligences from bee swarms to social networks to entire societies, and as machine intelligence develops powers outstripping our own, we confront a set of deep inquiries. This initiative seeks to explore the nature, purpose, and future of intelligence itself across biological, collective, and artificial systems.

Grantees accepted into the Intelligence Venture will have opportunities to connect with peer scientists and scholars across an array of fields to generate new insights and advance our shared understanding.

Core Themes of Inquiry

The initiative organizes its exploration around four foundational pillars:

1. The Story of Intelligence: How have philosophical and religious traditions understood intelligence historically, and how are they making sense of it today? What is the relationship between intelligence and related concepts such as adaptive behavior, agency, consciousness, sentience, and personhood?
2. The Diversity of Intelligence: Exploring the vast spectrum of intelligence across the biological world, from basic cellular mechanisms to advanced animal behavior.
3. The Plurality of Intelligence: Investigating collective and distributed intelligence systems, including social networks, insect swarms, and human societies.
4. The Future of Intelligence: Analyzing the trajectory, ethical implications, and capabilities of machine and artificial intelligence systems.

Funding Levels and Period

Starting in 2026, the John Templeton Foundation will award over $60 million in grants focused on these questions.

• Duration: Funding and grants will be distributed over a three-year period.
• Target Fields: Grants are open to philosophers, ethicists, biologists, neuroscientists, physicists, computer scientists, and researchers across multiple dimensions.

Participating Funding Areas

The venture spans across six distinct funding areas within the foundation. For guidance specific to your respective field, you can explore the individual areas below:

• Character Virtue Development: Supports the elevation and cultivation of character, focusing on moral, performance, civic, and intellectual virtues.
• Life Sciences: Supports research and engagement projects on the fundamental structures of the biological world.
• Public Engagement: Supports grantees to create content, cultivate thought leadership, and develop campus programming.
• Individual Freedom & Free Markets: Supports education, research, and outreach projects to promote individual freedom, free competition, and entrepreneurship.
• Mathematical & Physical Sciences: Supports research seeking to shed light on the fundamental concepts of physical reality.
• Religion, Science, & Society: Supports the discovery of meaningful and practical insights into the religious, spiritual, and cultural dimensions of humanity.

Application and more details: https://www.templeton.org/ventures/intelligence