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.
Pre-programme discovery projects
Following on from our discovery workshop, we funded a series of short, exploratory research projects that ran from December 2025 to February 2026. These projects ranged from exploring aspects of Arena design, diving into topics around physical trust and AI security theory, and running community events such as a hackathon.
Systemisation of Knowledge: Cryptographically verifiable supply chain data
Martin Klepmann, University of Cambridge
Trusted Molecular Memory: Exploring trust within hybrid computational systems
Larissa Pschetz, University of Edinburgh
Living Proof
Kimia Witte, University of Strathclyde
Formally verified coordination for trustworthy multi-agent systems
Kiran Gopinathan, Basis AI
Adversarial games for trustworthy AI systems
Davide Crapis, Independent
CME tournament
Enrico Botazzi, Independent
Untrustworthy Things Everywhere: An agentic challenge for securing cyber-physical industrial infrastructures
Awais Rashid, Hacktonics
LabTrust-Gym
Mateo Petel, Stanford University
Who am I? Digital identity in embodied AI
Mary Maller, Inversed Tech
SoTA’s cyber-physical security community
Jamie Croucher, Society of Technological Advancements (SoTA)
Benchmarking automated mechanism design
Samuele Marro, Institute of Decentralised AI
A substrate-independent, diagrammatic foundation for cryptographic trust
Martti Karvonen, UCL
AgentMatrix: Towards automated benchmarking and securing of AI agent interactions
Marios Kogias, Imperial College London
Physical-Layer Trust: Measuring embodied interaction in distributed robotic systems
Suet Lee, Autodiscovery Ltd.
Discovery projects demo day
We hosted a demo day to provide our pre-programme discovery teams with an opportunity to present their findings.
Discovery workshop
On 13-14 October 2025, we held a workshop that brought together experts from a range of fields to help shape the direction of a programme in this space through feedback, critique, collaboration and knowledge sharing. Catch up on the various speaker sessions by watching the recordings below.
Featured insights
Benchmarking automated mechanism design
As part of discovery funding, Samuele Marro and his team studied whether agents can automatically design, negotiate and follow game-theoretic interaction protocols. We recently caught up with Samuele to find out more about the project.