EU Frontier AI Initiative: Developing frontier AI solutions that are safe and computationally efficient within Apply AI (RIA)

What is this call about?

The call funds one large research and innovation action to train a European frontier AI model and to research methods that make such models more computationally efficient and safe.

What does this call fund?

Scope

The topic supports two strands of work. First, the development and training of a European frontier AI model with state-of-the-art performance, multimodal capabilities and optimisation for agentic uses such as tool use, reasoning and autonomous problem-solving. Second, research on methods that lower the computational demands of frontier models and make them safe, including automated testing and interpretability.

Research areas named in the call

• Compression and distillation of large models, new architectures and algorithms that reduce computing load in pre-training, post-training and inference
• Detection and mitigation of misalignment and misbehaviour, such as alignment faking, reward hacking and encoded reasoning in chain-of-thought
• Robustness against adversarial attacks, jailbreaks and backdoors, and greater transparency and interpretability
• Risks arising when frontier models are embedded in agentic AI frameworks

Expected outcomes

Stronger European capabilities in frontier AI, lower computational cost of frontier models, and safer advanced AI systems through safe-by-design principles and/or AI agents acting as safety evaluators.

Implementation requirements

The project should link with the Resource for AI Science in Europe (RAISE), the AI Factories and Data Labs, involve the European AI research community, share results through the AI-on-demand platform and set aside tasks for cooperation with the European Partnership on AI, data and robotics (ADRA) and the GenAI4EU hub. Proposals should include KPIs, benchmarking and progress monitoring. Work is expected to start at TRL 2 and reach TRL 4.

When is the deadline?

18 March 2027 (133 days)

18 March 2027. Single-stage submission; planned opening date 17 November 2026.