Backed by nearly £50m, ARIA’s 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.
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.
Funding: Tracks 2 & 3
Applications are open on a rolling basis and reviewed in quarterly batches. The next proposal cut-off is 31 October 2026 (14:00 GMT).
We’re accepting proposals across two tracks. In Track 2 (Tooling), we’re funding open-source agents and reusable components – spanning requirement capture, negotiation, security reasoning, and verifiable reporting – that will provide the baseline infrastructure usable by all in the Arena and beyond. In Track 3 (Fundamental Research), we’re funding foundational work across Formal AI Security, Cyber-Physical Primitives, Foundations of Generative Security, and open-ended Bluesky research – including three Research Centres to seed long-term nodes of expertise and anchor these emerging fields in the UK.
Timeline of the first quarter (the same pattern repeats every 3 months)
- Applications open: 4 September 2026
- Proposal cut-off: 31 October 2026
- Review period: 1–30 November 2026
- Applicant notification: 30 November 2026
ARIA expects to fund a small number of projects through this route and may choose not to make awards in a given review cycle. ARIA may update cut-off dates, pause the call or close it early if needed, including in response to proposal volume or programme portfolio needs.
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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.
We welcome applications from across the R&D ecosystem, including individuals, universities, research institutions, companies of all sizes, charities and public sector research organisations. What matters most to us is whether you’re excited about the programme and its thesis. Before applying, we encourage you to read the call for proposals in full alongside the programme thesis, and to check our community website – it captures our most up-to-date thinking, including emerging areas of interest, lessons from the developing portfolio, and areas where further proposals would be especially valuable.
Join a team
For those seeking specific expertise to support their proposal, our teaming request form gives you access to a list of others looking to find or share their expertise, plus a dedicated teaming channel on our community Discord.