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Home / Horizon Europe / HORIZON-CL4-2027-04-DIGITAL-EMERGING-11

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

Announced, not yet open · HORIZON Research and Innovation Actions · HORIZON-CL4-2027-04-DIGITAL-EMERGING-11

Next cut-off
18 Mar '27
in 193 days
Per grant
€44M
the call's own average
Grants expected
1
projects that will be funded
Funding rate
100%
the full cost of the action

In context of Horizon Europe

This grant€44M
The track runs to the largest grant in Horizon Europe (€171M). The median across the 482 calls we publish is €5.3M, this one is above it.

What this call funds

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:

  • Strengthened European capabilities in the development of frontier AI models.
  • Improved computational efficiency of frontier AI models, resulting in reduced computational costs.
  • Enhanced safety of advanced AI systems based on frontier AI models through the development and implementation of safe-by-design principles and/or AI agents acting as safety evaluators.

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 ↗.

What applying costs you

ItemEstimateNote
Drafting effort6–8 weekssingle submission
Partner search4–8 weeksruns in parallel, and it is the part that slips
Time to first payment6–9 monthscut-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.

Where these conditions come from

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.

ConditionQuoted from the call, or the rule behind it
Consortium sizeNot 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 rateNot quoted from this call — Research and Innovation Actions under the Horizon Europe rules are funded at 100% of eligible costs for every participant.
Maturitynull Activities are expected to start at TRL 2 and achieve TRL 4 by the end of the project – see General Annex B.

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