Frontier AI Discovery

Overview

Innovate UK is investing at least £2.5 million in Phase 1 of a Frontier AI programme to support early-stage feasibility studies, with a further £50 million planned for larger collaborative projects in Phase 2 (subject to approval).

The programme aims to position the UK as a leader in advanced AI, machine learning, and foundation models by supporting ambitious, UK-led innovation. It focuses on four key areas: AI for health and life sciences, AI-driven advanced materials, secure AI for defence, and fundamental AI capabilities that can be applied across sectors.

Phase 1 (Frontier AI Discovery) supports the development of feasibility studies, business models, and consortium building. Successful applicants can progress to Phase 2, where larger consortia-led projects (£5 million–£10 million) will run over 24–36 months.

Projects must demonstrate genuinely novel, state-of-the-art AI capabilities, driven by innovation in areas such as model architecture, training methods, or core algorithms.

Scope

The aim of this competition is to advance the development frontier Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and foundation models in the UK.

Projects must focus on a feasibility study to develop novel AI and ML technologies and help build the delivery consortia for Phase 2.

Proposals must result in AI driven novel products, processes or services that can make substantial technological improvements in addressing specific priorities from the listed thematic areas.

Proposals must articulate clearly:

• which thematic area and specific priority of this competition you are addressing
• the approach to engage and mobilise diverse stakeholders needed to deliver the feasibility study and Phase 2 if successful
• what new to the world innovation you plan to develop and why your organisation is best placed to lead this work

Projects must undertake a feasibility study to:

• build a consortium to develop a technical proposal and evaluate the business model
• confirm the commitment of this consortium if successful and invited to participate in phase 2
• propose the development of novel, new to the world AI and ML driven innovation that addresses opportunities aligned with at least one of the thematic areas in this competition
• produce a technical report outlining the approach you intend to implement in phase 2

Funding will be reserved for projects where AI is the core technical contribution and the main source of operational advantage.

To be in scope of this competition projects must clearly describe:

• serviceable market and customers
• background IP and route to defensibility
• technical novelty and benchmarked validation

Key themes and topics

Proposals must fall within one or more of the following themes. Each proposal must focus on one specific priority within the selected theme(s). Applications that do not align with the chosen theme and priority will not be sent for assessment.

Theme 1: AI Enabled Health and Life Sciences

This theme focuses on making the UK the best place to develop and deploy AI for drug discovery, development and manufacturing of medicines, clinical trials, and healthcare delivery.

Proposals must focus on one of the following priorities:

• medicines discovery
• medicines development and manufacturing process optimisation
• predictive healthcare applications to support healthcare delivery
• clinical trials
• genomics and multi-omics may be used as enabling technologies across any of the above areas, where relevant

Theme 2: Advanced Materials with AI

This theme aims to build a world-leading AI-first materials R&D capability, including applications in aerospace, net zero technologies, defence, and semiconductors.

Proposals must focus on one of the following priorities:

• material prediction: generative models and multi-objective optimisation
• physics machine learning (ML) models for discovery and simulation acceleration
• multimodal knowledge discovery platforms

Theme 3: Secure AI for National Security and Defence (NS&D)

This theme aims to enable the UK’s defence sector to become a leading integrator of secure AI-enhanced command and control, and AI-enabled sensors.

Proposals must focus on one of the following priorities:

• AI-driven assured multi-source fusion and analytics for distributed heterogeneous information, including multimodal systems for decision support
• edge autonomy and robust decision and control AI systems, low-SWaP inference, quantum-AI and semiconductor-AI for novel underwater sensors
• secure and robust AI, ML-driven signal processing, including AI for acoustic signal processing and digital electronic warfare

UKRI is committed to maximising the contribution of intellectual and knowledge assets, including intellectual property arising from funded research and innovation, to support national security and defence, including through dual-use applications. Reference should be made to UKRI’s published guidance on national security and defence research for further information.

Theme 4: Fundamental AI

This theme focuses on advancing foundation model AI capabilities that can underpin multiple sectors and future applications.

Proposals must focus on one of the following priorities:

• abstract reasoning and generalisation
• novel AI and ML architectures and methodologies, including online learning and world model learning systems
• generalisable explainable AI

Project duration

Projects must:

• start by 1 August 2026
• end by 31 January 2028
• last between 12 and 18 months

Award value

Projects must have total costs between £250,000 and £750,000

Funding rates

For feasibility studies, which evaluates a project’s potential by uncovering key factors and informing confident, well-founded decisions about moving forward, you can get funding for your eligible project costs of:

• up to 70% if you are a micro or small organisation
• up to 60% if you are a medium sized organisation
• up to 50% if you are a large organisation

Research organisations can share up to 100% of the total eligible project costs

Eligibility criteria

• Projects can be led by a UK registered business of any size; an academic institution; a charity; a not for profit; a public sector organisation; or a research and technology organisation (RTO)
• Subcontractors must be UK-based with fully justified and appropriate costs
• All funded project work must be carried out within the UK
• Intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
• Either Subsidy control and state aid rules apply