Investing in multi-agent AI safety research

Google DeepMind, Schmidt Sciences, the Cooperative AI Foundation, ARIA and Google.org

For the past decade, we’ve focused on making individual AI models more capable, helpful and safe. Today, Google DeepMind — together with Schmidt Sciences , the Cooperative AI Foundation , the Advanced Research and Invention Agency , and supported by Google.org — is announcing a new technical research funding call of up to $10M for researchers worldwide.

As AI technology scales, we’re entering a new era. Soon, millions of AI agents — built by different organizations — will interact across digital environments, communicating, negotiating and transacting with one another.

This effort also advances the mission of Schmidt Sciences’ Science of Trustworthy AI and AI Agents programs, which support foundational work on understanding and mitigating risks from frontier AI systems, as well as ARIA’s Scaling Trust programme, which seeks to unlock new forms of cyber-physical multi-agent coordination.

When these systems interact, they must do so safely and predictably. This shift creates a vital opportunity: we can strengthen the safety and stability of the entire AI ecosystem from the very beginning.

The funding call focuses on the study of how large-scale multi-agent AI systems behave as a group, and how we can provide frameworks to understand and mitigate against potential risks. By empowering researchers globally, we aim to solve the “invisible” safety risks that arise when independent systems interact across different networks.

When large groups of AI agents interact, new collective behaviors and capabilities can emerge suddenly. Currently, we lack the tools to predict, measure and monitor these transitions. Most safety evaluations analyze models in isolation. However, as we and others have previously argued, interacting autonomous agents can produce complex, "emergent" behaviors that are difficult to anticipate.