Backed by £59m, ARIA’s Safeguarded AI programme sits within the Mathematics for Safe AI opportunity space and aims to demonstrate a world where we can use fleets of AI agents to model and verify critical cyber and cyber-physical systems, radically boosting societal resilience.
As part of our updated programme thesis, we seek to test and accelerate the hypothesis that AI-enabled formal methods can make high-assurance cyber defence practical at scale.
Within Technical Area 2, this funding call pursues the question: given the advances in AI and formal methods, what are the most ambitious, security-critical systems we can verify today?
We will fund teams to build production-grade, security-critical software components whose key security properties are backed by machine-checked proofs, validated through coordinated red-team exercises.
We will evaluate teams for their credible interest and ability to carry developed capabilities towards large-scale deployment, whether themselves or through spinouts, partnerships, upstreaming, or other routes.
The call is structured as two tracks: Track 1 (Blue Teams) for building and verifying security-critical components, and Track 2 (Red Team) for adversarial evaluation.
Track 1 | Blue Teams: We will fund 3–6 teams to build production-grade, security-critical software components whose key security properties are backed by machine-checked proofs, under clearly stated threat models and assumptions, using AI as a central means of reaching levels of ambition for formal proof that would otherwise not be tractable. Funding of £2.5m-£3.5m per team.
Track 2 | Red Team: We are also looking for applications to fund one central Red Team. They will be responsible for executing, within each sprint cycle, a thorough pen-testing effort of every Blue Team’s system, and document the results in a report. Just like for Blue Teams, the intelligent use of AI will play a central role in thorough Red Teaming. Funding of £2m-£3m for a single team.
Funding for the track 1 Blue Teams will be provided under our R&D funding terms, while funding for the track 2 Red Team will be provided under our commercial service terms. Please read the call for proposals for details on each.
Note that Red and Blue Teams need to be independent. While applicants are free to apply to both tracks, we will not appoint the same organisation or team to serve in both capacities.
We welcome applications from across the R&D ecosystem, including startups, industry and academia. We typically require the majority of the project work to be conducted in the UK (i.e. >50% of project costs and personnel time).
Join a team
We have a live teaming tool that allows applicants to find complementary expertise. After a quick registration, you can browse other researchers and request an introduction from the ARIA team to explore potential collaborations.
The first batch of applications is open until July 1st. We expect to inform the first successful teams by July 31st. We anticipate keeping the funding call open until early 2027, reviewing subsequent applications at an approximately monthly cadence. Any teams joining after the official start date of September 1st will slot into the sprint cycles at the earliest opportunity.