Our goal
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.
Success would unlock a new era of coordination that preserves our plurality, protects our privacy, and creates value we can't yet fully imagine.
Programme tracks
This programme is split into three mutually reinforcing tracks:
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.
Tooling
Open-source coordination infrastructure usable by all in the Arena and beyond, to steer innovation toward the most meaningful axes of progress.
Fundamental research
Theory that helps move us from empirical to theory-driven guarantees, and that helps us design new security primitives that can aid agentic coordination.
Funding for Tracks 2 + 3 now open until 24 March 2026
We’re looking to fund projects across our Tooling and Fundamental Research Tracks, developing open-source coordination infrastructure for AI agents as well as building upon fundamental research into areas such as cyber-physical primitives and generative cryptography.
The Scaling Trust Arena
The Scaling Trust Arena is planned to launch in Q3 2026. We’ll be putting out a call for a technical partner to build and deliver the Arena in the coming months. If you’re interested in applying, please submit your expression of interest so we can let you know as soon as the call is live.
Join the conversation
The Trust Everything, Everywhere Discord server provides a space for collaboration and discussion amongst ARIA funded projects as well as the wider community, where we encourage members to share insights, ideas, and build in public.
Hackathon 7-8th March
The Society for Technological Advancement (SoTA) are running a Trust Everything, Everywhere Hackathon to bring together individuals to explore making AI deployment safe, secure and trusted in an increasingly programmable cyber-physical reality.
Meet the programme team
Our Programme Directors are supported by a core team that provides a blend of operational coordination and highly specialised technical expertise.
Alex Obadia
Programme Director
Alex is an entrepreneur and investor in early-stage frontier technologies, with a keen interest for quantum cryptography. Previously, he co-founded Flashbots, a software unicorn dedicated to safeguarding the decentralisation and permissionlessness of the Ethereum blockchain. Flashbots’ products have helped generate nearly £2bn so far and its R&D sparked the 'MEV' industry.
Sarath Murugan
Programme Specialist
Sarath joined ARIA from a business operations and strategy role in a defence engineering scale-up, where his team developed a product that brought the capabilities of gen-AI to the disconnected-edge. He holds an LLB from Bristol, and has experience in project and product-facing roles. Sarath supports ARIA as an operating partner from Pace.
Nicola Greco
External Technical Advisor
Nicola is a cryptography researcher and investor. Over the last decade, he has led Protocol Labs’ Cryptography R&D team who pioneered the use of zero-knowledge cryptography in production systems, and was the first check in multiple unicorns. Formerly, he was a fellow at the Harvard Center for Internet and Society and a PhD student at MIT advised by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.
Edith-Clare Hall
Frontier Specialist
Edith works alongside the Programme Directors to scope out emerging areas of technology that can shape current and future ARIA programmes. Her doctoral work is in Soft Robotics and Engineering Mathematics at the University of Bristol, where she has developed bespoke wearable robots for progressive disease, leveraging novel hardware and AI.
We're hiring a Technical Specialist
We are hiring a Technical Specialist - Cyber-Physical Multi-Agent Systems to help shape and deliver a bold programme of research in this space.
Programme development
Discover some of the ways we've shaped this programme.
Discovery workshops
On 13-14 October, we held a workshop that brought together experts from a range of fields to help shape the direction of a programme in this space through feedback, critique, collaboration and knowledge sharing. Catch up on the various speaker sessions by watching the recordings below.
Sign up for updates
Stay up-to-date on our opportunity spaces and programmes, be the first to know about our funding calls and get the latest news from ARIA.