Artificial intelligence is transforming grant writing. A new wave of AI tools, known as agents, can now generate a research grant application, review it and submit it. AI agents are large language models (LLMs) equipped with tools that let them search the web, read documents, write and execute code, and call external services, for example. Given a goal, rather than a single prompt, they respond by planning a sequence of steps that they execute, evaluate and iterate until the goal is met — usually with little or no human intervention. We need a new ethics for a world of AI agents Agents can be trained on a researcher’s entire published body of work, on the grant criteria of the most relevant funding panel and on the texts of the most recently funded grants from that panel, all of which are often publicly available. They can produce tens of ideas, from which a researcher can select the best for the agent to work up into fully-formatted applications.…