Backed by nearly £50m, the ARIA (Advanced Research and Innovation Agency) Scaling Trust 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.
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.
The 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.
By carefully designing this live adversarial environment and the challenges deployed within it, we plan to both measure the state of the art in multi-agent security capabilities and failure modes, and to exert pressure for secure agentic interactions to emerge.
ARIA are now looking for a partner to co-design, build and maintain the Arena, which we plan to launch in Q3 2026.
Acting as an extension of the Scaling Trust programme team, this partner will be capable of operating at pace, to deliver a robust, modular testing ground that can move from prototype to public operation over the course of the programme.
Beyond providing core engineering capacity, the ideal partner will help shape the Arena’s fundamental mechanisms including challenge design, scoring systems and community interfaces, whilst ensuring the platform remains secure, observable and accessible to a global community of participants.
The Arena is intended to be a central interface across the wider Scaling Trust programme. We expect the Arena partner to engage with grantees from other tracks in order to help integrate their work into the Arena.
Who can apply?
ARIA do not have hard constraints on the type of organisation they will work with. You might be an engineering consultancy, a startup, a frontier AI lab, a university research group, a nonprofit or a group of individuals specially mobilising into a new entity for this call.
Requirements and budget
For full details of what is expected of the successful applicant(s), read the Request for Proposals from ARIA.
We’re looking to fund one partner over a period of three years (initial 12 month contract with options to extend based on performance). We anticipate a budget of circa £10m (inc VAT where applicable) for the three years – including early cyber-physical efforts.
The £10m earmarked is designed to cover the digital and cyber–physical aspects of the arena, there is scope for more funding if justified, subject to ARIA internal approval.
How to apply
Applicants should submit an initial two page proposal by 14 April 2026. Teams shortlisted based on their initial proposals will be invited to meet with ARIA to discuss their proposal (15-30 April).