Applications open
A free month of Claude Code for university students and professors in Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia — to get your research done faster.
Claude Code is Anthropic's AI coding tool — it writes and fixes code with you from the terminal. For research work it's practical leverage: cleaning field data, reproducing a paper's analysis, automating the scripts your thesis depends on, building the survey site your lab needs. A subscription costs more than it should on a student budget in the region, so we're covering it — partly because we suspect the most interesting uses of tools like this will come from researchers the price currently excludes, and we want to learn from what you do. These tools are still in their infancy and most of what they could be applied to hasn't been explored; we'd like to remove the barrier and learn alongside you how something this powerful can be used for good.
Selected scholars get a personal seat for one month, free. Extensions from our reserve go to the scholars who put the seat to the most interesting use — not the heaviest. You'll answer two short surveys (3–5 minutes) so we can learn what worked. By default the seat shares your Claude sessions with us — what you asked, what Claude did — because that is where we learn what people actually do with this. We collect it mainly to understand how people use tools like this once price is out of the way, so that future educational and philanthropic programs (ours and other people's) can be designed around real use. You can opt out on the form. If you do, your lottery odds are halved, and an extension becomes unlikely, since we decide those on what we can see.
No documents needed to apply. If selected, we'll ask for a student or staff card photo, a link to your faculty page, or a one-line reply from your university email.
It's a gate, not a contest: we check that you're really a student or professor at a university in the region, that paying yourself isn't realistic right now, and that you'd actually use the seat this month (public rubric, AI-assisted, human-checked). Everyone who clears the gate goes into a fair lottery for the 10 seats — we don't rank essays, so plain answers in your own words are exactly what we want. Answer in any language you like — whichever one you actually think in. We read them all, and writing in your own language never counts against you.
The program runs in rounds like this until 1 January 2027. If we extend it, this page says so first.
Answer in whichever language you write most easily — any language at all. Writing in your own language never counts against you. Around 100 words each; specific beats polished.
Two friends — one in North America, one in Europe — who think covering seats like this does real good for very little money, and that what scholars do with them is worth learning from. It's an independent two-person project; the rubric and the process are public. Questions? Email hello@wildcardscholarship.org — we read everything.