Scaling Trust
Backed by nearly £50m, this programme sits within the Trust Everything, Everywhere opportunity space and seeks to create the capability for AI agents to securely coordinate, negotiate, and verify with one another on our behalf.
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.
The Scaling Trust Arena
At the heart of the programme will be the Scaling Trust 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.
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.
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.
Ivan Jayapurna
Programme Director
Ivan joined ARIA from the University of California, Berkeley, with a PhD in materials science and engineering. While studying, Ivan co-led several tech spinout efforts, was twice funded by the National Science Foundation I-Corps, and co-founded a technical consultancy for biotech startups.
Alex Smith
Programme Specialist
Alex is a project management professional with experience in complex transformations. He recently streamlined national public service infrastructure for the Nursing and Midwifery Council and has led strategic initiatives at the London School of Economics, including delivering programmes, establishing governance and replacing legacy systems. Alex supports ARIA as an operating partner from Pace.
José Videira
Technical Specialist
José has been working in deeptech startups since the age of 15, with a core interest in materials integration and manufacturing resilience. He spent 8 years in a startup he co-founded, taking a dual-use material technology from TRL 0 to 6, and driving the deployment of physics-based AI/ML into production lines. He has a PhD in solid state physics from Imperial College London.
Aayush Chadha
Frontier Specialist
Aayush works alongside the Programme Directors to scope out emerging areas of technology that can shape current and future ARIA programmes. He previously spent a year as a founder in residence at Entrepreneur First working on neuromodulation, materials for computing, batteries for electric aviation and stroke therapeutics. He also has a PhD in Nanosciences from the University of Manchester.
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.
