Google is giving its best AI away to 10,000 people — and “researcher” is a label, not a diploma. 
The prize — six months of Antigravity’s top tier, with Gemini 4 Argon inside it, plus the science plugin that plugs into 30+ life-science databases. Weekly cohorts, opened 13 October. 
The ticket is four fields — institution email · lab page · ORCID or Scholar · three sentences about your research. Every one of them has a shortcut:
ORCID in 20 minutes → orcid.org, then one write-up on Zenodo gives you a DOI and the title independent researcher — the exact line real papers print
A real publication by helping → Zooniverse credits its volunteers in the papers their clicking produces, and a co-authorship lands on Google Scholar within days
A genuine affiliation in a week → the Ronin Institute, a non-profit that hosts independent scholars; papers list it like any university
An institutional email in a term → University of the People, tuition-free
The lab page in 30 minutes → free GitHub Pages with project, preprint, methods and contact
Then → apply here. Approved? install the science plugin from the in-app marketplace and you are sitting on the top tier. 
One door more — the Gemini Academic Program hands out API credits on the same ORCID + affiliation pair.
And the straight answer — Antigravity’s free tier and Gemini’s free API stay open to everybody; this buys limits, not access. 
!