Announced, not yet open · HORIZON Research and Innovation Actions · HORIZON-CL4-2027-04-DIGITAL-EMERGING-11
Expected Outcome:
The Apply AI Strategy[1] also seeks to bolster EU capabilities and achieve excellence in AI to support the development of European frontier models. As part of the Frontier AI Initiative, which brings together Europe’s leading actors in the field, this topic will support the development of sovereign frontier AI ensuring safety by design. This topic directly contributes to the Apply AI Strategy. Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:
Scope:
To advance developments of frontier AI models towards highest-level performance, while ensuring energy efficiency, addressing computational constraints, and strengthening safety. The approach of this topic is twofold. First, it aims to advance the AI field through the development and training of a frontier AI model. The AI model should demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, have multimodal capabilities, and be optimized for agentic AI capabilities such as tool use, reasoning, and autonomous problem-solving. Second, this topic supports research on comprehensive methods to reduce the computational demands of frontier AI models and to ensure their safety, including technical methodologies such as automated testing and interpretability.
Trimmed here, the full scope, expected outcomes and award criteria are on the official topic page ↗.
| Item | Estimate | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Drafting effort | 6–8 weeks | single submission |
| Partner search | 4–8 weeks | runs in parallel, and it is the part that slips |
| Time to first payment | 6–9 months | cut-off → evaluation → grant agreement |
These are Bemzu's estimates from the call's structure (the number of stages and whether a consortium is required) not figures published by the Commission. Only the co-financing share is read from the call itself.
Two kinds of row. Most are the sentence we read the condition from, quoted out of the call itself. Some say plainly that they are not a quotation but the programme's own rule for this type of action, the EU portal publishes a table of contents where the conditions should be, so for a Research and Innovation Action the rate comes from the rulebook rather than from the fiche.
| Condition | Quoted from the call, or the rule behind it |
|---|---|
| Consortium size | Not quoted from this call — Research and Innovation Actions under the Horizon Europe rules are at least three independent legal entities from three different Member States or Associated Countries, at least one established in a Member State. |
| Funding rate | Not quoted from this call — Research and Innovation Actions under the Horizon Europe rules are funded at 100% of eligible costs for every participant. |
| Maturity | null Activities are expected to start at TRL 2 and achieve TRL 4 by the end of the project – see General Annex B. |
Eight questions, no account, nothing sent anywhere. You will know which of the 1526 open calls you can actually enter before you finish your coffee.
Check my fit