Purpose: Assessing grant applications is time-consuming and difficult, adding to the overall burden of academic peer review. Whilst funders are exploring whether AI can help, there is no published research into the accuracy of Large Language Models (LLMs) for scoring contemporary grants. Design/methodology/approach: This study investigates whether six open-weight LLMs (Gemma 3 1B/4B/12B/27B, DeepSeek R1 32B, Qwen 3 32B) can give useful scores for 2267 recent UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant applications, comparing them with scores from the original reviewers and funding panel members. Findings: Although the LLM scores are individually inaccurate, when averaged and converted to ranks they correlate positively with expert average scores. The best performing LLM, Gemma 3 27B (10 iterations with varied prompts), had moderate rank correlations with average reviewer scores (mean rho=0.26). Gemma 3 27B's average correlation with individual reviewers was 0.19, which is lower than the inter-reviewer mean correlation of 0.24, suggesting that it scores are slightly weaker than individual reviewer scores. Gemma 3 27B had weak rank correlations with average panel member scores (mean rho=0.17), with lower average correlations with individual panellists (mean rho=0.14), which is substantially lower than the inter-panellist correlation (mean rho=0.38). Whilst the correlations seem too weak to replace expert review at the final panel stage, LLM scores might help with the initial reviewing state, such as by helping identify the weakest proposals for fast-track desk rejections, to replace one human reviewer, or for triangulation to check for bias.

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