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AI Exploration (AIE) is DARPA's streamlined funding instrument for rapidly testing high-risk artificial intelligence concepts, and it is the primary vehicle through which the agency's AI Forward initiative pursues trustworthy AI for national security missions.
AIE opportunities use an abbreviated program announcement with simplified proposal requirements and compressed contracting timelines — DARPA's goal is to move from announcement to award in roughly 90 days rather than the many months a conventional BAA requires. Individual AIE efforts are typically capped around $1 million over an 18-month feasibility study, with successful efforts positioned to feed into full DARPA programs.
AI Forward specifically targets the gap between today's statistical machine learning and the assured, explainable, context-aware AI that defense missions demand, spanning topics such as foundations of trust in AI, reasoning and world models, human-AI teaming, and defenses against adversarial manipulation.
New AIE opportunities are posted continuously across DARPA's technical offices, so the practical approach is to monitor the DARPA opportunities feed rather than wait for an annual cycle.
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Or search similar grants →According to the current listing, eligibility includes: Open to all responsible sources including universities, large and small businesses, nonprofits, and nontraditional defense contractors; DARPA actively encourages first-time and nontraditional performers, and AIE's simplified process is designed partly to lower their barrier to entry. Proposals are submitted via the DARPA BAA Tool against the specific AIE announcement posted on SAM.gov. Foreign participation is restricted per the terms of each individual announcement. Confirm the full requirements in the official notice before applying.
The current listing shows AI Exploration awards are typically up to $1,000,000 for an 18-month feasibility study, structured as a firm-fixed-price or cost-type agreement under a simplified DARPA program announcement. Verify award ceilings, matching requirements, and allowable costs in the official notice.
DARPA AI Exploration (AIE) Opportunities under the AI Forward Initiative for Trustworthy AI in National Security is funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Verify program details on the funder's official page before applying.
Start from the official opportunity page linked in this listing — it carries the sponsor's submission instructions.
The ONR Long Range Broad Agency Announcement (N00014-25-S-B001) is the Office of Naval Research's primary mechanism for soliciting research proposals across all naval science and technology priority areas. The BAA accepts proposals on a rolling basis through September 30, 2026 and covers ONR's full spectrum of research interests with particular emphasis on AI-related topics including autonomous maritime systems, human-machine teaming, machine learning for sensor fusion, cooperative autonomous swarm technology, undersea autonomy, and AI-enabled decision superiority. Proposals can be funded through multiple mechanisms including individual investigator grants, the Young Investigator Program (~$510K over 3 years for early-career faculty), and Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) awards ($1.5M/year for 3-5 years for research teams). ONR recommends contacting relevant program officers before submitting to discuss alignment with current research priorities. The BAA supports basic research (6.1), applied research (6.2), and advanced technology development (6.3) across the full range of naval-relevant science and engineering disciplines.
PRIMED-AI is a new NIH Common Fund programme, Precision Medicine with AI: Integrating Imaging with Multimodal Data, which combines medical imaging with other health data to build AI-powered clinical decision support tools for personalised medicine. This opportunity, RFA-RM-27-014, funds the programme's Validation Center: a dedicated hub that independently evaluates and characterises the AI-enabled, image-based multimodal clinical decision support tools developed elsewhere in the consortium. The structural logic matters for applicants. NIH has separated tool-building from tool-validation and is paying separately for the second, which signals institutional recognition that self-reported performance claims from developing teams are not sufficient evidence for clinical AI. The Center's remit covers verification, validation, interoperability and uncertainty quantification, so the deliverable is a reproducible evaluation capability rather than a set of papers. It operates as a U54 cooperative agreement, meaning NIH staff are substantively involved and the Center must work in concert with the PRIMED-AI Logistics Center and the Data-to-Model and Model-to-Clinic award recipients. The RFA was released on 30 June 2026 with applications due 2 October 2026. For academic groups that have built credible AI evaluation methodology, particularly in radiology, imaging informatics or biostatistics, this is an unusually direct route to becoming the reference evaluator for a major federal AI health programme, and the position carries influence over how clinical AI performance gets measured well beyond the life of the award.
RFA-RM-27-015 funds a single Logistics Center as the coordinating hub of the NIH Common Fund's PRIMED-AI program, Precision Medicine with AI: Integrating Imaging with Multimodal Data. The award is a cooperative agreement, meaning substantial NIH scientific and programmatic involvement is built in rather than incidental, and it is administered by NIBIB on behalf of the Common Fund. The Center operates through three integrated cores: Administration, which runs the steering committees and develops consortium policies; Evaluation, which assesses progress across the funded portfolio; and Outreach, which maintains a web portal for sharing AI-based clinical decision support tools and facilitates engagement between researchers, clinicians and patient communities. The strategic point for applicants is that this is the only coordinating award in a multi-award program whose other components, the Data-to-Model Academic-Industrial Partnerships, Model-to-Clinic and Multi-use Frameworks Playbook RFAs, are separately competed and separately funded. The Logistics Center therefore does not generate its own AI models; it is scored on its capacity to run a consortium, set data and tool-sharing policy, and build infrastructure that makes other teams' clinical decision support tools discoverable and reusable. Applications are due by 5:00 PM local time of the applicant organization on the date specified for the relevant review cycle, with an earliest project start date of 2 October 2026 and a maximum project period of five years.
DARPA's FY26 Release 6 carries seven SBIR and three STTR topics closing October 21, 2026. TRIAGE-X and ICU-in-a-Box are listed at $2 million each, CORPS at $750,000 — not Phase I feasibility money. Meanwhile DoW FY-27 Release 1 pre-released October 7 with 25 topics, zero of them DARPA's, and a new one-proposal-per-topic rule that took effect October 1. Here is how to read both calendars.
Read articleDPA26BZ06-DV023 is a Direct-to-Phase-II SBIR paying $700,000 over 18 months plus a $500,000 option. The physics demands 256x more transmit power than the systems that qualify you to compete, and DARPA will not accept modeling alone as proof. Here is the eligibility wall, the five engineering problems, and who can realistically win it before the October 21 close.
Read articleRelease 6's SBIR topics got the attention. Its three STTR topics — SHIELDER, fuel-flexible electric propulsion, and hypersonic wind tunnel noise diagnostics — are all Direct-to-Phase-II, all require a research institution to perform at least 30 percent of the work, and all close October 21, 2026. The feasibility gates are the real filter.
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