Where funders stand on AI
This is the question we get asked before any other, usually by the people who write grants for a living. It deserves a straight answer rather than reassurance.
Some funders have started saying no
In July 2025 the National Institutes of Health published notice NOT-OD-25-132, “Supporting Fairness and Originality in NIH Research Applications”. It caps a principal investigator at six new, renewal, resubmission or revision applications per calendar year, effective from the 25 September 2025 receipt date. The notice says why in as many words: it describes “instances of PIs submitting large numbers of applications, some of which may have been generated with AI tools” that “may unfairly strain NIH’s review”.
That is one funder, and it is a large one. It is reasonable to expect others to follow, and reasonable to assume reviewers are already reading with this in mind whether or not their agency has published anything.
We would rather you knew that before buying software from us than after.
And most people have already tried it
The 2026 Nonprofit AI Adoption Report from Virtuous and Fundraising.AI, a benchmark of 346 organizations, found that 92 percent have adopted AI while only 7 percent say it has expanded what their team can accomplish. Nearly half had no policy governing its use.
So the useful question is not whether AI can produce text. Everyone knows it can. The question is whether it produces something a reviewer will fund and a funder will accept.
How Quillify is built differently
Four choices, each of which keeps the substance yours.
- It drafts from your documents, not from nothing
- The writer works from the files you select: your past proposals, your program descriptions, your budgets, your evaluation data. The facts in the draft are facts you supplied, and that includes images, charts and scanned pages, which are read rather than skipped.
- You direct the revisions, in your own words
- Ask for a more specific budget narrative or a new partnership added, and it edits those sections and leaves the rest alone. You are not regenerating and hoping, you are directing.
- Every proposal comes with a list of what you still have to do
- The compliance checklist names each requirement, where it is addressed, and specifically what your team must supply itself. Software cannot sign your assurances, produce your audited financials, or secure your letters of commitment. We would rather tell you that than let you discover it late.
- It grades the draft before you send it
- The evaluator scores the proposal against the announcement the way a reviewer would, and hands back a prioritized list of what is weak. That is the step that turns a draft into something worth submitting, and it is the step most tools leave out.
What we will not tell you
We cannot tell you a given funder will accept an AI-assisted application, because that is their decision and their policies are changing. We cannot tell you a draft will win. And we will not tell you the proposal writes itself, because the parts only you can supply, the program design, the evidence, the relationships, are the parts that decide the outcome.
What we can tell you is that the thinking stays yours, and that you will know exactly what the draft claims before it goes out, because you gave it the material and you checked the list.
See it before you commit to anything.
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