Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will invest a minimum of £2.5 million on Frontier AI. This funding is from Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation and is subject to a sufficient number of high quality applications being received. The aim of this competition is to advance the development of frontier Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and foundation models in the UK.
This competition has 2 phases; the second phase will be available to successful applications from Phase 1. Innovate UK will invest a minimum of £50 million for development of Frontier AI demonstrator projects in Phase 2, delivered by collaborative consortia. Funding for Phase 2 is subject to Business Case approvals.
The Frontier AI R&D Consortia programme aims to accelerate and deliver novel UK-led AI capabilities. The programme is bringing together large scale consortia, to develop foundation models and frontier AI solutions aligned with one of the four missions:
- AI-Enabled Health and Life Sciences: Making the UK the best place to develop and deploy AI across medicines discovery, development and manufacturing, predictive healthcare applications, and clinical trials.
- Advanced Materials with AI: Building a world leading AI-first materials R&D capability spanning aerospace, net zero technologies, defence materials, semiconductors.
- Secure AI for National Security and Defence (NS&D): Enabling the UK’s defence sector to become a leading integrator of secure AI-enhanced command and control and AI enabled sensors.
- Fundamental AI: Advancing Foundation Model AI capabilities that can underpin multiple sectors and future applications.
In this competition series, Foundation Models refers to highly generalisable AI models or model families. These are designed to adapt across multiple downstream tasks or domains and are anchored to a hypothesis that supports adaptability. As part of our funding portfolio, we expect to fund at least 25% of projects on the development of foundation models.
In this competition series, Frontier AI refers to be any AI and ML systems that deliver state of the art benchmark performance against, or genuinely new to the world capability in, a clearly specified area.
This advance must be attributable to innovation in one or more of the following:
- model and system architecture
- training methodology
- core control and learning algorithm
The Frontier AI Discovery is Phase 1 of the pipeline. We are seeking applications that will assess the feasibility of ambitious collaborative R&D proposals and help build consortia for Phase 2. These proposals must capture opportunities aligned with the thematic priorities by developing new‑to‑the‑world AI and ML capabilities.
Your proposal must deliver:
- feasibility and technical proposal for Phase 2
- business model evaluation
- the development of delivery consortia for Phase 2
- de-risking of the next stage of development through this feasibility study
Successful Phase 1 projects will be invited to submit full proposals for collaborative R&D projects with project costs from £5 million to £10 million per project and duration of 24 to 36 months. Funding for Phase 2 is subject to Innovate UK Business Case approvals.
Phase 2
Any organisation can lead a Phase 2 project and for your consortium to be eligible your project must:
- have total costs of between £5 million and £10 million
- last between 24 to 32 months
- end by 31 March 2030
Phase 2 project consortium must have minimum participation from:
- large organisations contributing 30% to 40% of the project costs
- SME organisations contributing more than 30% of the project costs
- academic organisation contributing 20% to 30% of the project costs
Our experience from similar competitions suggests that you could have 2% chance of success.
For larger initial projects, there is a similar IUK competition, AI Champions: Frontier AI Phase 1, open until 29 April 2026, which is only open to SMEs, and has expected phase 1 costs of £150k-£250k, with phase 2 costs expected to be up to £1m.
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To work alone your organisation must be a UK:
- business of any size
- research organisation
- research and technology organisation (RTO)
- charity
- not for profit
- public sector organisation
- non-governmental organisation (NGO)
In phase 1 applicants must work alone, though subcontractors are allowed. Subcontracting costs are limited to 30% of total project costs.
A business, research organisation, research and technology organisation (RTO), charity, not for profit, non-governmental organisation (NGO) or public sector organisation can only lead on one application.
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Your project must:
- have total costs of between £25,000 and £50,000
- last up to three months
- start by 1 October 2026
- end by 31 January 2027
Any funded organisation needs to carry out their project work in the UK and must intend to exploit the project results from or in the UK.
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The aim of this competition is to advance the development frontier Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and foundation models in the UK.
Your project must focus on a feasibility study to develop novel AI and ML technologies and help build the delivery consortia for Phase 2.
Your proposal must result in AI driven novel products, processes or services that can make substantial technological improvements in addressing specific priorities from the listed thematic areas.
Your proposal must articulate clearly:
- which thematic area and specific priority of this competition you are addressing
- the approach to engage and mobilise diverse stakeholders needed to deliver the feasibility study and Phase 2 if successful
- what new to the world innovation you plan to develop and why your organisation is best placed to lead this work
Your project must undertake a feasibility study to:
- build a consortium to develop a technical proposal and evaluate the business model
- confirm the commitment of this consortium if successful and invited to participate in phase 2
- propose the development of novel, new to the world AI and ML driven innovation that addresses opportunities aligned with at least one of the thematic areas in this competition
- produce a technical report outlining the approach you intend to implement in phase 2
Funding will be reserved for projects where AI is the core technical contribution and the main source of operational advantage.
To be in scope of this competition your project must clearly describe:
- serviceable market and customers
- background IP and route to defensibility
- technical novelty and benchmarked validation
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Your proposal must fall within one or more of the following themes. You must focus on one specific priority within each theme you select. If your application does not align with the theme and specific priority you select, it will not be sent for assessment.
Theme 1: AI Enabled Health and Life Sciences: making the UK the best place to develop and deploy AI for drug discovery, development and manufacturing of medicines, clinical trials and healthcare delivery.
You must focus on one of the following priorities:
- medicines discovery
- medicines development and manufacturing process optimisation
- predictive healthcare applications to support healthcare delivery
- clinical trials
- genomics and multi-omics may be used as enabling technologies across any of the above areas, where relevant
Theme 2: Advanced Materials with AI: building a world leading AI-first materials R&D capability, including applications in aerospace, net zero technologies, defence and semiconductors.
You must focus on one of the following priorities:
- material prediction: generative models and multi objective optimisation
- physics Machine Learning (ML) models for discovery and simulation acceleration
- multimodal knowledge discovery platforms
Theme 3: Secure AI for National Security and Defence (NS&D). Enable the UK’s defence sector to become a leading integrator of secure AI-enhanced command and control and AI enabled sensors.
You must focus on one of the following priorities:
- AI driven assured multi-source fusion and analytics for distributed heterogeneous information, multimodal systems for decision support
- edge autonomy and robust decision, control AI systems, Low-Swap inference, quantum-AI and semiconductor-AI for novel underwater sensors
- secure and robust AI, ML driven signal processing, AI for acoustic signal processing and digital EW
UKRI is committed to maximising the contribution that intellectual and knowledge assets, including intellectual property, arising from research and innovation we fund, can make to supporting national security and defence, including through dual use. Please see UKRI published guidance on National Security and Defence research for more information.
Theme 4: Fundamental AI. Advancing foundation model AI capabilities that can underpin multiple sectors and future applications.
You must focus on one of the following priorities:
- abstract reasoning and generalisation
- novel AI, ML architectures & methodologies, online learning and world model learning systems
- generalisable explainable AI
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Innovate UK will hold an online briefing for potential applicants on Wednesday 22 April at 2pm: click here to register for a place. A recording and slides will be available afterwards.
If you would like help to find a subcontractor or have other queries, contact Innovate UK Business Connect’s AI team.
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If you need more information about how to apply, please read our funding support pages. For additional support, reach out to our team of innovation experts who are ready to help you navigate the application process and maximise your chances of success.
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