Open Door Grant Program

The Long Range BAA is ONR's omnibus front door and the single most useful entry point for researchers who want Navy funding but are not responding to a named topic. It solicits Long-Range Science and Technology projects aimed at enhancing Navy and Marine Corps operations across science and engineering disciplines, and it is jointly issued with ONR Global and the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory - which matters because ONRG opens the door to non-U.S. performers and MCWL brings a distinct expeditionary problem set. For AI proposers the alignment is strong: ONR's 2026 Science and Technology Strategy names AI and autonomy as the organisation's top research focus, spanning machine learning, adversarial AI, intelligent agents, autonomous systems, and modelling and simulation. The strategy is built around a FEED at Speed framework and ties every research programme to a transition path, so proposals that articulate how a capability reaches the fleet are advantaged over those that stop at publication. ONR has additionally launched a strategic initiative to use AI to conduct basic and applied research rather than only to research AI for naval use cases, which opens space for AI-for-science proposals inside a defence portfolio. Eligibility is deliberately wide - all responsible sources from academia, industry and the research community worldwide may submit, and both small and large businesses compete, with the applicable SBA size standard at 1,000 employees. ONR does not publish per-award amounts. Submissions go through the ONR Submission Portal; FedConnect is no longer accepted as of Amendment 0004. The response deadline has been extended to 30 September 2026; the primary contact is Matthew Murray.

ONR's Long Range BAA is the standing front door to Navy and Marine Corps science and technology funding, and it is the vehicle most AI and autonomy researchers should be using rather than waiting for a topic-specific call. It accepts proposals on a rolling basis - the FY25 announcement, N00014-25-S-B001, runs through 30 September 2026 at 2:00 PM EST - and covers the full ONR portfolio, with AI-relevant priorities concentrated in autonomous maritime systems, human-machine teaming, and machine learning for sensor fusion and decision support. ONR's 2026 science and technology strategy tied programs to explicit transition paths, which changes what a competitive proposal looks like: the naval-unique problem underneath the AI method now has to be legible, and a general-purpose ML advance with a thin naval framing reads poorly. Firms with commercially mature AI, autonomy or sensing products are often better served by acquisition and rapid-fielding vehicles, reserving LRBAA proposals for genuine research questions. Practically, the process runs white paper first then full proposal on invitation, and identifying the right ONR program officer before writing anything is the single highest-leverage step - the BAA lists technical points of contact by division and proposals that arrive without prior program officer contact rarely advance. Seven amendments to the FY25 BAA were issued, so working from the current amended document matters.

This is the EuroHPC access mode built specifically for AI workloads, and it is the most direct route for European researchers who need serious compute without a Horizon Europe grant behind them. Allocations are made in node hours across four petascale and pre-exascale systems - LUMI in Finland, Leonardo in Italy, MareNostrum5 in Spain and MeluXina in Luxembourg - for six-month access periods. The stated scope is explicit about modern AI: ethical artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cutting-edge foundation models and generative AI including large language models, which means training and fine-tuning runs are in scope rather than being squeezed into a traditional simulation-oriented HPC framing. Eligibility is deliberately wide. All scientific users qualify whether or not their work is funded by national or European programmes, as do public sector users, and industrial users participating in EU-funded research and innovation projects such as Horizon Europe or the Digital Europe Programme. The one important boundary: industrial users not involved in an EU research project are directed instead to the AI for Industrial Innovation access modes, so a commercial applicant with no EU project affiliation should check which door they are meant to use before drafting. The call operates on rolling cut-offs rather than a single deadline, with 2026 cut-offs at 27 February, 30 April, 30 June, 31 August, 30 October and 11 December, each at 10:00 CET. That cadence means an unsuccessful application can be revised and resubmitted roughly two months later, and a team that misses one window is never waiting long for the next. As with all compute schemes, no money is awarded - staff and data costs must come from elsewhere.