Scaling Trust
Backed by nearly £50m, this programme sits within the Trust Everything, Everywhere opportunity space and seeks to create the capability for AI agents to securely coordinate, negotiate, and verify with one another on our behalf.
Our goal
AI agents are already writing code, browsing the web, managing workflows, and beginning to act in the physical world. But while individual agents grow more capable by the day, they still can't securely coordinate with each other, especially in real world scenarios when the stakes are high, the parties are untrusted, and the environment is adversarial.
We are missing the trust infrastructure that would move them from solo operators to secure collaborators. Without it, agents remain either powerful but isolated or acting in the wild with no security at all.
This programme is building that infrastructure: open-source tools and scientific foundations for agents to securely interact across digital and physical worlds, combined with a live adversarial arena to stress-test everything we build.
Success would unlock a new era of coordination that preserves our plurality, protects our privacy, and creates value we can't yet fully imagine.
Programme tracks
This programme is split into three mutually reinforcing tracks:
Arena
A platform for open competitions designed to test AI systems’ capabilities in multi-agent coordination across digital and physical worlds, with a multi-million pound prize pool for the strongest teams.
Tooling
Open-source coordination infrastructure usable by all in the Arena and beyond, to steer innovation toward the most meaningful axes of progress.
Fundamental research
Theory that helps move us from empirical to theory-driven guarantees, and that helps us design new security primitives that can aid agentic coordination.
The Scaling Trust Arena
At the heart of the programme will be the Scaling Trust Arena: a platform for open competitions designed to test AI systems’ capabilities in multi-agent coordination across digital and physical worlds, with a multi-million pound prize pool for the strongest teams.
Join the conversation
The Trust Everything, Everywhere Discord server provides a space for collaboration and discussion amongst ARIA funded projects as well as the wider community, where we encourage members to share insights, ideas, and build in public.
Meet the programme team
Our Programme Directors are supported by a core team that provides a blend of operational coordination and highly specialised technical expertise.
Alex Obadia
Programme Director
Alex is an entrepreneur and investor in early-stage frontier technologies, with a keen interest for quantum cryptography. Previously, he co-founded Flashbots, a software unicorn dedicated to safeguarding the decentralisation and permissionlessness of the Ethereum blockchain. Flashbots’ products have helped generate nearly £2bn so far and its R&D sparked the 'MEV' industry.
Sarath Murugan
Programme Specialist
Sarath joined ARIA from a business operations and strategy role in a defence engineering scale-up, where his team developed a product that brought the capabilities of gen-AI to the disconnected-edge. He holds an LLB from Bristol, and has experience in project and product-facing roles. Sarath supports ARIA as an operating partner from Pace.
Nicola Greco
External Technical Advisor
Nicola is a cryptography researcher and investor. Over the last decade, he has led Protocol Labs’ Cryptography R&D team who pioneered the use of zero-knowledge cryptography in production systems, and was the first check in multiple unicorns. Formerly, he was a fellow at the Harvard Center for Internet and Society and a PhD student at MIT advised by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.
Edith-Clare Hall
Frontier Specialist
Edith works alongside the Programme Directors to scope out emerging areas of technology that can shape current and future ARIA programmes. Her doctoral work is in Soft Robotics and Engineering Mathematics at the University of Bristol, where she has developed bespoke wearable robots for progressive disease, leveraging novel hardware and AI.
We're hiring a Science + Technology Lead
We are hiring a Science + Technology Lead – Cyber-Physical Multi-Agent Systems to help shape and deliver a bold programme of research in this space.
Programme discovery
To help guide our thinking and shape the programme’s development, we funded a series of short, exploratory research projects running from December 2025 to February 2026.