Backed by £15 million in funding, the UK’s AI Security Institute is leading a new project with Anthropic, Amazon, and the Canadian AI Safety Institute to ensure AI alignment.

AI alignment is a crucial field in AI research – focused on making sure the technology always acts in the public’s interests and rooting out harmful behaviours which could post a risk to society.

The fund is backed by an international coalition including the Canadian AI Safety Institute, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Schmidt Sciences, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Anthropic, Halcyon Futures, the Safe AI Fund, UK Research and Innovation, and the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA).

The international span reflects a growing consensus – across government, industry, academia, and philanthropy – that alignment is an urgent technical challenge, and that expanding the field is a shared responsibility.

The project will fund research into AI alignment, including ways to make sure AI systems continue to follow ethical goals as the technology becomes more capable and finding techniques to ensure AI systems remain transparent and responsible to human oversight.

AI continues to develop at breakneck speed, with the 2025 International AI Safety Report highlighting how advanced models are rapidly improving their capabilities and demonstrating PhD-levels of knowledge in some areas.

Today’s methods for controlling AI are likely to be insufficient for tomorrow’s more capable systems as the technology continues to develop, with the need for co-ordinated global action to ensure the long-term safety of citizens more pressing than ever.

“Advanced AI systems are already exceeding human performance in some areas, so it’s crucial we’re driving forward research to ensure this transformative technology is behaving in our interests,” science and technology secretary Peter Kyle said.

“AI alignment is all geared towards making systems behave as we want them to, so they are always acting in our best interests. This is at the heart of the work the Institute has been leading since day one – safeguarding our national security and ensuring the British public are protected from the most serious risks AI could pose as the technology becomes more and more advanced.

“The responsible development of AI needs a co-ordinated global approach, and this fund will help us make AI more reliable, more trustworthy, and more capable of delivering the growth, better public services, and high-skilled jobs that drive our Plan for Change.”

The Alignment Project will be guided by an expert advisory board including Yoshua Bengio, Nico Kolter, Shafi Goldwasser, and Andrea Lincoln, who will collaborate in aiming to remove barriers that have previously limited alignment research.

The board will offer three distinct levels of support, including grant funding of up to £1 million tor researchers, compute access including up to £5m in dedicated cloud computing credits, and venture capital from private funders.

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Governments, philanthropists, and industry partners are now able to come forward to join The Alignment Project, with the ability to contribute through research grants, cloud compute resources, or venture funding.

“AI alignment is one of the most urgent and under-resourced challenges of our time. Progress is essential, but it’s not happening fast enough relative to the rapid pace of AI development. Misaligned, highly capable systems could act in ways beyond our ability to control, with profound global implications,” Geoffrey Irving, chief scientist, AI Security Institute said.

“The Alignment Project tackles this head-on by bringing together governments, industry, philanthropists, VC and researchers to close the critical gaps in alignment research. International coordination isn’t just valuable – it’s necessary.

“By providing funding, compute resources, and interdisciplinary collaboration to bring more ideas to bear on the problem, we hope to increase the chance that transformative AI systems serve humanity reliably, safely, and in ways we can trust.”