Applications open
A fully funded month of Claude Code — Anthropic's agentic coding tool — for builders anywhere in the world held back by its price.
Claude Code gives one determined person the output of a small team. Nearly everything known about what people do with that kind of leverage comes from one narrow demographic: well-paid, English-speaking, productivity-driven. The Scholarship exists because we think some of the most interesting uses will be invented by the people the price currently excludes — students, self-taught developers, career-switchers, anywhere in the world — and the only way to find out is to fund the seats and watch what happens.
Scholars receive a personal Claude Code seat in our workspace for one month. Extensions from our reserve go to the scholars who put the seat to the most interesting use — not the heaviest — and our working definition of interesting is public. There is no cost at any point.
It's a gate, not a contest. Against a published rubric (AI-assisted, with human oversight) we check exactly two things: that paying for tools like this is a genuine barrier for you, and that you could actually use the seat this month. Everyone who clears the gate enters a lottery for the 10 seats, seeded from a public randomness beacon. We don't rank applications — the uses we're most curious about are precisely the ones an essay can't predict, and ranking rewards polish. Substance matters, prose doesn't, and among qualified applicants, chance — not connections — decides.
Write in whatever language you're most comfortable in. Short, specific answers beat long, polished ones.
Two friends — one in North America, one in Europe — who think funding seats like this does real good at very small cost, and that what scholars do with them is worth studying. It's an independent two-person project; the code, rubric, and process are all public. Questions? Email hello@wildcardscholarship.org.