Pre-programme discovery projects
To help guide our thinking and shape the programme’s development, we funded a series of short, exploratory research projects running from December 2025 to February 2026. These projects range from exploring aspects of Arena design, diving into topics around physical trust and AI security theory, and running community events such as a hackathon.
Systemisation of Knowledge: Cryptographically verifiable supply chain data
Martin Klepmann, University of Cambridge
Trusted Molecular Memory: Exploring trust within hybrid computational systems
Larissa Pschetz, University of Edinburgh
Living Proof
Kimia Witte, University of Strathclyde
Formally verified coordination for trustworthy multi-agent systems
Kiran Gopinathan, Basis AI
Adversarial games for trustworthy AI systems
Davide Crapis, Independent
CME tournament
Enrico Botazzi, Independent
Untrustworthy Things Everywhere: An agentic challenge for securing cyber-physical industrial infrastructures
Awais Rashid, Hacktronics
LabTrust-Gym
Mateo Petel, Stanford University
Who am I? Digital identity in embodied AI
Mary Maller, Inversed Tech
SoTA’s cyber-physical security community
Jamie Croucher, Society of Technological Advancements (SoTA)
Benchmarking automated mechanism design
Samuele Marro, Institute of Decentralised AI
A substrate-independent, diagrammatic foundation for cryptographic trust
Martti Karvonen, UCL
AgentMatrix: Towards automated benchmarking and securing of AI agent interactions
Mario Kogias, Imperial College London
Physical-Layer Trust: Measuring embodied interaction in distributed robotic systems
Suet Lee, Autodiscovery Ltd.
Programme Development
As we develop a programme in the Trust Everything, Everywhere opportunity space, we're sharing our current thinking in the form of a programme thesis. This programme is expected to launch in February 2026.
Scaling Trust
In the Scaling Trust thesis, we propose that:
- AI is collapsing coordination costs, signalling a new era for our society and our economy.
- As opposed to an all-powerful, all-knowing AI, we envision this era as one of many AI agents, each acting as our faithful representatives, able to go out into both digital and physical worlds and mobilise, negotiate, and verify on our behalf.
- Security primitives, like programmable cryptography and secure hardware, represent an opportunity to realise this vision by creating scalable, cyber-physical trust infrastructure for agents and enabling previously impossible forms of secure interactions.
- This programme proposes three core efforts: advancing fundamental research into agentic coordination; building open-source tools to make this capability robust and available to all; and setting up a series of challenges that will test AI systems’ capabilities in adversarial environments, with multi-million pound prize funds for the best teams.
Read the full thesis below, and share your feedback to help us refine our thinking as we shape a programme in this space.
Shaping our programme direction
Trust Everything, Everywhere Hackathon: 7-8 March 2026
The Society for Technological Advancement (SoTA) are delivering a hackathon as part of our discovery funding. The event will bring together earnest, high-agency and industrious individuals to explore making AI deployment safe, secure and trusted in an increasingly programmable cyber-physical reality.
Discovery workshop sessions
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.
Pre-programme discovery projects
To help guide our thinking and shape the programme’s development, we have funded a series of short, exploratory research projects. These projects range from diving into particular research directions and technical feasibilities to exploring ethical and governance needs.
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.
Join our team
We are hiring a Technical Specialist - Cyber-Physical Multi-Agent Systems to help shape and deliver a bold programme of research in this space.