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The Jeremy Coller Foundation and Tel Aviv University (TAU) have announced the four finalists for the annual US$100,000 prize from the Coller Dolittle Challenge for Two-Way Interspecies Communication. The research spans zebra finches, African striped mice, chimpanzees and bonobos, revealing groundbreaking new advancements towards human-animal communication.
Through the challenge, a prize of US$100,000 is awarded annually for the most promising research seeking to develop an algorithm for communication with non-human organisms. The teams must use non-invasive approaches, demonstrate communication in more than one context using the animal’s endogenous communication signals, and show a measurable response from the animal.
Inspired by the Turing test, a Grand Prize of either a US$10 million equity investment or a US$500,000 cash prize will be awarded when the animal communicates independently with the research team without recognizing that it is communicating with humans.
Leveraging the latest AI innovations, the four teams from the United States, France, and Switzerland have uncovered trailblazing insights into the complexity of non-human communication:
- Zebra Finches Recognize Individuals: Julie E Elie, from the Theunissen Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, has found that zebra finches use a complex repertoire of call-types to communicate who they are and what they are doing.
- Territorial African Striped Mice: Nicolas Mathevon from the University of Saint-Étienne and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (PSL) and his team have discovered that African striped mice use short-range ultrasonic vocalizations that encode group identity and vary by location. This enables the mice to extend signals into a broader communication system that supports complex social and territorial interactions.
- Chimpanzees’ Complex Combinatorial Vocal System: Catherine Crockford and Roman Wittig with team members Cedric Girard-Buttoz and Antoine Valet of the CNRS Institute for Cognitive Sciences in Lyon, and directors of the Tai Chimpanzee Project in Ivory Coast, have combined natural observations, behavioral experiments, and AI-based audio-to-context mapping to reveal that chimpanzees have a more complex and interpretable communication system than previously recognized.
- Closing the Gap Between Bonobo and Human Communication: A research team led by Mélissa Berthet (University of Zürich), Martin Surbeck (Harvard University), and Simon Townsend (University of Zürich) has revealed that bonobos combine vocal calls into structured and meaningful sequences resembling human sentences. The findings suggest that their communication system shares deeper similarities with human language than previously thought.
“The judging panel has been impressed by the quality of submissions this year,” Professor Yossi Yovel of TAU and the Chair of the Coller Dolittle Challenge said. “The proliferation of AI is providing new tools to understand animal communication that we could only have dreamed of in the past. The finalists have used novel ways to decipher non-human communication and made pioneering strides towards helping us understand how other species speak to each other. Choosing our winner in June will not be an easy task.”
“Humans unlocking the ability to speak to other animals would usher in a new era for the world, but for that to happen we must first understand how they communicate with each other,” added Jeremy Coller, Founder & Chairman of the Coller Foundation. “I’m so excited to see the finalists for the 2026 Coller Dolittle Prize using the latest AI tools to bring us within striking distance of that long-held dream becoming a reality.”
The prize winner will be announced live at a virtual event on June 25, 2026. The event will also feature a keynote speech from Professor Ofer Tchernichovski, Hunter College, City University of New York, titled “Decoding Animal Talk: A virtual reality system reveals how songbirds engage with virtual partners.”
Learn more at https://www.aftau.org/
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