The UK government will provide researchers with grants of up to £200,000 to work on boosting resilience against AI risks such as deepfakes, misinformation and cyber-attacks.

The grants will be made available through the AI Safety Institute and aim to ensure the safe adoption of AI technology to help improve public services.

The AI Safety Institute is looking to back around 20 projects worth £4 million over the course of its first phase. The total fund is around £8.5 million, with the government planning additional funding as further phases are announced.

It will also support research to tackle the threat of AI systems failing unexpectedly in areas including the financial sector.

The scheme has been launched in partnership with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Innovate UK.

The government said that the research will boost public confidence in AI technology, which is a “central” part of the government’s plans to harness the potential of AI to increase productivity.

The programme aims to encourage a broad range of research to identify the critical risks of frontier AI adoption in critical sectors like healthcare and energy services, identifying potential solutions which can then be transformed into long-term tools which tackle potential AI risks in these areas.

“This grants programme allows us to advance broader understanding on the emerging topic of systemic AI safety,” said Ian Hogarth, chair of the AI Safety Institute. “It will focus on identifying and mitigating risks associated with AI deployment in specific sectors which could impact society, whether that’s in areas like deepfakes or the potential for AI systems to fail unexpectedly.

“By bringing together researcher from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds into this process of contributing to a broader base of AI research, we’re building up empirical evidence of where AI models could pose risks so we can develop a rounded approach to AI safety for the global public good.”

---