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This is the funding mechanism rather than a single call, and understanding it is what makes DARPA's AI portfolio actually accessible to a small team.
Artificial Intelligence Exploration (AIE) is DARPA's streamlined contracting vehicle for high-risk, high-payoff AI projects: researchers have 18 months from award to establish the feasibility of a new AI concept, and DARPA compresses the path from proposal to project kickoff to roughly three months - a timeline no conventional BAA offers. Awards may be worth up to $1,000,000 each.
The AI Forward initiative, which emerged from two summer 2023 workshops with roughly 200 participants drawn from commercial, academic and government sectors, is the strategic frame that generates most current AIE Opportunities, and it organises them around three research thrusts: foundational theory that establishes what is possible and where the guardrails belong for national security applications, AI engineering that makes systems function reliably under real-world conditions, and human-AI teaming that produces trustworthy teammate systems for users of widely differing backgrounds.
Component efforts released under this umbrella include EMHAT (Exploratory Models of Human-AI Teams), FACT (Friction for Accountability in Conversational Transactions) and FoundSci (Foundation Models for Scientific Discovery), each issued as its own AIE Opportunity with its own announcement number, deadline and scope. Roughly 70 percent of current DARPA programs incorporate AI or machine learning, so the surface area is large.
The practical move for anyone tracking this space is to monitor DARPA's Research Opportunities page and its opportunities RSS feed rather than waiting for an annual cycle, because AIE Opportunities appear on a rolling basis and close fast.
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Or search similar grants →According to the current listing, eligibility includes: AIE Opportunities are issued as individual program announcements, and each one sets its own eligibility, submission format and deadline - there is no single standing eligibility statement covering the mechanism. DARPA program announcements of this type are generally open to universities, non-profit research organisations, FFRDCs and for-profit companies including small businesses, with specific restrictions stated in each announcement. Proposers respond with an abstract or full proposal per the announcement instructions, and DARPA uses streamlined contracting procedures and other-transaction-style funding instruments to reach project kickoff within approximately three months of the announcement. The period of performance is 18 months, structured to establish feasibility of a new AI concept rather than to mature a system. Award value is up to $1,000,000 per award as described in each AIE Opportunity. Applicants must find the specific open AIE Opportunity that matches their concept: DARPA directs proposers to its Research Opportunities listing at darpa.mil/work-with-us/opportunities and publishes an opportunities RSS feed at darpa.mil/rss/opportunities.xml, and individual announcements are also posted to SAM.gov. Confirm the current award ceiling, eligibility, page limits and closing date in the specific announcement before preparing anything, because these vary between AIE Opportunities. Confirm the full requirements in the official notice before applying.
The current listing shows DARPA states AIE awards may be worth up to $1,000,000 each, as described in each individual AIE Opportunity announcement, with an 18-month period of performance to establish feasibility. amount_min and amount_max are both set to 1,000,000 to reflect that single published ceiling; actual awards under a given AIE Opportunity may be smaller and each announcement sets its own value. Note this is the per-award ceiling for the AIE mechanism, not the AI Forward initiative envelope - DARPA has invested over $2 billion through the broader AI Next campaign since 2018. Verify award ceilings, matching requirements, and allowable costs in the official notice.
DARPA AI Forward Artificial Intelligence Exploration (AIE) Rolling Opportunities for High-Risk Trustworthy AI Concepts in National Security is funded by U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), primarily the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) under the AI Forward initiative. 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.
AFOSR's open Broad Agency Announcement — the single front door to Air Force basic research funding — closed on March 23, 2026 for mandatory review under Executive Order 14332, and proposals submitted in its final week must be resubmitted to a replacement that has no posted date. Meanwhile NRL's Long Range BAA takes white papers only through September 30, and the Air Force's new $99 million command-and-control BAA runs to 2028 with a March 15, 2027 white paper date for FY28 money. A field guide to the rolling-solicitation channel while it is in flux.
Read articleDARPA'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 articleThe University-Based Industrial Training and Assessment Center solicitation opened October 2 and closes October 30, 2026 at 3:00 PM ET. Up to $375,000 per track per year for five years, 20 percent cost share, ABET-accredited engineering required, submitted through Submittable.
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