AI Scientist

Funding update: January 2026

When we issued our call for proposals on AI Scientists – autonomous systems capable of reasoning, planning, and executing experiments – we received 245 applications. It was the largest response to any ARIA call to date, describing work that would have been almost unimaginable just a year ago.

To reflect both the scale of interest and the pace of progress in this emerging field, we have doubled our investment from £3 million to £6 million, supporting 12 projects that span frontier organisations and ambitious new entrants.

Explore the funded projects

Learn more about the funding call below.

Funding – now closed

We are inviting proposals for a series of short, exploratory projects to be undertaken using existing AI Scientist systems. We are specifically looking for AI systems that can perform the full end-to-end workflow of scientific knowledge creation. This includes:

• Ideation and hypothesis creation.

• The design of experiments to test the hypothesis.

• The ability to run experiments in (ideally fully-automated) labs.

• Interpretation of the results and the drawing of conclusions.

• The ability to produce a written report describing related work, the idea explored, experiments, results, and conclusions, placed in the context of relevant literature.

The final report must also include a clear and unambiguous acknowledgement of what roles or actions any human performed in the process. Your proposal should clearly state the expected human-in-the-loop involvement, the rough capabilities of your AI Scientist, and supporting evidence that the system will be able to perform the work.

As a nascent area, we recognise that current AI Scientist systems are often specialised. Therefore, a proposal can specify the research area and problem the AI Scientist will tackle. We ask each applicant to propose a ‘base’ problem that they are confident their system can solve, and an ‘extension’ problem that may be more challenging.