Our 2025 Annual Report
The past few years have seen a steady drumbeat of discoveries that illustrate the complex communications and culture of other animals, many of them accelerated by significant advances in technology. We are proud to be part of this incredible progress in understanding our fellow species.
Our 2025 Annual Report highlights the advances we’ve made with our partners over the past year in the burgeoning new field of Animal Language Processing. Across our three core program pillars – Research to Decode, Building the Field, and Preparing Society for Impact – we expanded the tools, partnerships, and conversations needed to advance interspecies understanding.
Research to Decode
In 2025, we focused on two core areas: 1) developing foundation models for animal communication. and 2) partnering with biologists to point these tools at specific Decode projects. These projects generate new datasets and insights, which improve our general models over time.
We open-sourced our flagship foundation model, NatureLM-audio, the first large audio language model designed specifically for analyzing animal sounds. We published 14 new papers, expanded collaborations with researchers studying species ranging from killer whales (with Raincoast Conservation Foundation) to zebra finches (with McGill University) to carrion crows (with Universidad de León), and saw our work recognized at leading conferences including ICLR, NeurIPS, ICASSP, and DCASE.
Building the Field
In 2025, Earth Species Project co-organized the AI for Non-Human Animal Communication workshop at NeurIPS in San Diego, alongside representatives from Google DeepMind, ENES Lab Saint-Etienne, Naturalis Biodiversity Center. The workshop marked the first time this topic was formally introduced at a major AI conference.
Our team co-organized a challenge for BioDCASE focused on Multi-Channel Alignment, which tackles the difficult problem of resynchronizing and aligning audio from multiple recording devices. We also co-organized the LINGUAE-animals Seminar with Phillippe Schlenker, Lucie Pavaux, Institut Jean-Nicod, and LSCP.
Preparing Society for Impact
Our work is not just about science, it’s about reimagining our place on Earth and inspiring new systems that will bring us back into balance with the rest of nature. Alongside our core research, we work to bring scientists, policymakers, and the public into conversation about what interspecies understanding could mean for society, and how those insights might shape future relationships between humans and other species.
We carried out a landscape study of the legal, political, and cultural implications of our work with Earth Law Center to identify new partners and initiatives to engage with. With The Collective Intelligence Project, we conducted a global survey to establish a baseline on public sentiment around AI-enabled interspecies understanding. The conversations emerging from this work suggest that people around the world are eager to imagine new relationships with the rest of life on Earth.
2026 and Beyond
In early 2026, we prepared for the next phase of our journey with the appointment of Steven VanRoekel as CEO. As the field continues to accelerate, we remain committed to breaking the interspecies understanding barrier and building a future where that deeper understanding benefits all life on Earth.
The work described in this report would not be possible without our collaborators, supporters, and community. Thank you for helping drive this work forward. We invite you to explore the report and join us as we continue working toward a future where deeper understanding between species benefits all life on Earth.