Funding – now open
Submit your proposals by 24 March 2026 (14:00 GMT)
At the heart of the Scaling Trust 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.
In Phase 1 of this programme, we are seeking to fund teams to develop open-source tools for future Arena participants and perform fundamental research that moves us from empirical to theory-driven guarantees in agentic coordination.
Programme tracks open for funding
In advance of launching the Scaling Trust Arena, we are looking to fund teams across the following programme tracks:
Track 2 | Tooling: Open-source agents and reusable components that enable secure requirement capture, negotiation, protocol generation, and verification in multi-agent settings. Must be usable by all Arena participants, built for adversarial environments, and designed to generalise beyond single tasks.
Track 3 | Fundamental research: Foundational work that turns empirical security into provable guarantees, and unlocks new cyber-physical trust primitives for agents. Focus areas include formal AI security, generative protocol design and verification, and cyber-physical trust anchors.
Full details of what is in and out of scope for each area can be found in the call for proposals.
Who should apply?
We invite applications from interdisciplinary teams bridging fields like cryptography, AI security engineering, game theory, robotics and more. We welcome applications from those at universities, research institutes, startups, and established companies, as well as from individuals. We encourage collaborative teams, but solo applicants are also invited to apply. Applicants can be based in the UK or abroad.
Join a team
For those seeking specific expertise to support their proposal, we have created a teaming request form to facilitate finding potential team members who have registered their interest in this programme. After a quick registration you will gain access to a list of other individuals seeking to find/share their expertise and a dedicated teaming channel on our community Discord.
How to apply
Funding for projects within the Tooling and Fundamental Research tracks is now open.
We will run multiple webinars which provide an overview of the programme’s objectives, scope, and application process, and to give potential applicants an opportunity to ask questions to the ARIA team – please register your interest and submit questions in advance for these events.
Webinar 1: 17 February 2026 (15:30 GMT) - register here
Webinar 2: 3 March 2026 (16:00 GMT) - register here
Key information
Submission deadline: 24 March 2026 (14:00 GMT)
Grant size: £100k–£3m
Grant duration: 3 months–1 year (with potential for renewal)
Read the call for proposals for full details and apply below.
Resources
Clarification questions
If you can't attend our webinars or have any additional questions, please use the chat function on this page for the quickest response – you'll find the icon in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen. It can guide you to the right information or connect you with the ARIA team if needed. We’ll update this page regularly with questions and answers.
Nb: Clarification questions that need to be reviewed by the ARIA team should be submitted via the chat function no later than 4 days prior to the relevant deadline date. Clarification questions received after this date will not be reviewed.