Scaling Trust

Scaling Trust is a large‑scale, approximately £49.8m research and development programme run by ARIA within the Trust Everything, Everywhere opportunity space. Its mission is to build the tools, protocols, and security foundations that allow AI agents to safely coordinate, negotiate, and verify agreements with each other and with human stakeholders, even in adversarial or untrusted digital and cyber‑physical environments. The programme funds two main pillars of work: (1) open‑source tooling – modular agents and components for secure requirement capture, negotiation, protocol generation, and verification; and (2) fundamental research that upgrades today’s largely empirical AI security practices into theory‑driven guarantees for multi‑agent systems. Projects span short‑term tooling grants and longer research centre‑style efforts, with strong emphasis on reusability and participation in a future Scaling Trust Arena where different tools interoperate. By dramatically reducing the costs and frictions of establishing and enforcing trust between autonomous systems, Scaling Trust aims to unlock new classes of cyber‑physical markets and enable AI agents to act on behalf of users with measurable trustworthiness and robust security properties.

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Start Date

Feb 10, 2026

End Date

-

Expected Duration

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Funding Raised to Date

$49,800,000