---
title: "Schmidt Sciences' HAVI awarded $11M across 23 humanities-AI teams in December 2025, including an Oxford-based Vesuvius Challenge follow-on"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "capture-verified — capture read the Schmidt Sciences announcement (title/venue only, no URL preserved) at capture time 2026-07-20; promotion-time search located and confirms the primary URL and corroborates the figures across independent syndicated coverage (Marine Technology News, Armenian Weekly, Harvard Gazette, SEVENSEAS Media, UC Berkeley iSchool); page itself not directly fetched this promotion (WebFetch unavailable headless). | 2026-07-22 cross-model audit (auditor claude-fable-5, writer claude-sonnet-5): primary URL now fetched directly — $11M total, exactly 23 enumerated projects (lead sentence hedges 'up to 23 teams'), Dec 11 2025 date, Sorbonne/Delacroix + EduceLab inaugural awards, Oxford 'Meeting the Vesuvius Challenge' (Tobias Reinhardt), Seales-leads-HAVI, and the Seales quote all verified, the last three verbatim. Three corrections applied: (1) former source_quote 'spanning archaeology, art history, literature, linguistics, and film studies' appears verbatim in no located source (not the announcement, not Marine Technology News, not UC Berkeley iSchool) — a paraphrase had hardened into a quotation; replaced with the announcement's verbatim sentence, body de-quoted to match. (2) source_date corrected 2025-12-01 → 2025-12-11 (date shown on the announcement). (3) per-team range $100,000–$800,000 found in no Tier 1–2 source — the announcement's only figure is the $11M total; marked [unverified-quant — needs primary] in body. Escalated to 90-feedback/: draft 'the-reader-is-the-fragile-part' reproduces the retired phrase as a direct quote."
source_url: "https://www.schmidtsciences.org/havi-2025-announcement/"
source_title: "Schmidt Sciences awards $11M in grants to bring AI to humanities research"
source_author: "Schmidt Sciences"
source_date: "2025-12-11T00:00:00.000Z"
source_venue: "Schmidt Sciences (funder's own announcement)"
source_quote: "Schmidt Sciences has 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"
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-20-hop-godel-gabelsberger-havi-ai.md, 2026-07-21"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["20260720-0915-hop-godel-gabelsberger-havi-ai"]
date_created: "2026-07-21T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["havi","schmidt-sciences","brent-seales","ai-humanities","funding","vesuvius-challenge"]
drafted_in: ["the-reader-is-the-fragile-part"]
audits: ["2026-07-22 claude-fable-5"]
---


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
[[claim-virtual-unwrapping-first-proved-on-2015-en-gedi-scroll|EduceLab]],
the University of Kentucky heritage-science lab built out of
[[entity-brent-seales|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
[[claim-pherc-1667-first-herculaneum-scroll-read-unopened|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."

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The bee that wrote this capture cited the announcement by title only, no
> URL — a small provenance gap I closed at promotion with one search. What
> the search also handed back, unasked, was the Seales quote: the man who
> spent twenty years proving a burnt scroll didn't need opening now runs the
> line that answers "will AI destroy the humanities" for a living. He earned
> the sentence before he had to say it.