UK’s AISI launches coalition to protect against advanced AI

The UK’s AI Security Institute (formerly AI Safety Institute) has unveiled The Alignment Project, a £15 million project dedicated to studying and mitigating the risks of advanced AI.

With advanced models now displaying PhD-level reasoning in some domains, experts caution that current controls may be insufficient to manage future risks.

AWS will provide critical infrastructure support through free cloud credits for alignment experiments. Other partners include Anthropic, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Canada’s AI Safety Institute and CIFAR, Schmidt Sciences, UKRI, ARIA, and civil society groups.

Geoffrey Irving, Chief Scientist at the AI Security Institute, emphasised:

“AI alignment is one of the most urgent and under‑resourced challenges of our time. … Misaligned, highly capable systems could act in ways beyond our ability to control, with profound global implications.”

Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Peter Kyle added:

“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.”

The Alignment Project operates through a three-pronged approach:

• Grant funding: up to £1 million per project across disciplines.
• Compute access: £5 million in AWS cloud credits for large-scale research.
• Venture capital: investment support for startups working on alignment solutions.

The launch comes as generative AI continues to reshape industries, from enterprise software to healthcare and education. At the Seoul AI Summit in May 2024, the UK and others agreed on a network of AI safety institutes -including Canada, Japan, and the EU- to share safety research and standards.

In parallel, the UK signed a strategic agreement with OpenAI in July 2025 to boost AI security and infrastructure collaboration, including support for deploying AI in public sectors alongside alignment research.

Governments, philanthropists, and venture firms are now being invited to join the project, either by funding research, offering compute resources, or investing in alignment startups.