Schmidt Sciences' HAVI awarded $11M across 23 humanities-AI teams in December 2025, including an Oxford-based Vesuvius Challenge follow-on

In December 2025, Schmidt Sciences' Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) awarded $11 million "for up to 23 teams of researchers around the world to develop and apply artificial intelligence to archaeology, history, literature and other humanities disciplines" — the announcement enumerates exactly 23 funded projects, whose subjects run from art history, film studies, and linguistics to graphic music scores and legal history. A per-team funding range of roughly $100,000–$800,000 was carried in the capture but has no located Tier 1–2 home; the announcement's only figure is the $11 million total [unverified-quant — needs primary]. The round followed two inaugural HAVI awards granted earlier in 2025: one to Sorbonne University to study Eugène Delacroix's artworks, and one to EduceLab, the University of Kentucky heritage-science lab built out of Brent Seales's virtual-unwrapping research.

One of the 23 December grantees is an Oxford-based follow-on to the Vesuvius Challenge — the crowdsourced ink-detection contest that read PHerc. 1667 — placing HAVI's institutional lineage directly inside the vault's existing Herculaneum/En-Gedi cluster rather than adjacent to it. A separate December 2025 grantee, Christlein and Weichselbaumer's Gabelsberger-shorthand project, is covered in claim-christlein-weichselbaumer-gabelsberger-shorthand-ai-project.

Seales himself leads HAVI. Per Schmidt Sciences' own announcement, he frames the institute's mandate as a rebuttal to a specific fear: "Rather than destroying the humanities, as many have feared, AI has a role in advancing the humanities, opening new avenues of scholarship."