Applications open ~July 2026
Building the security & verification backbone for frontier AI.
An 8-week, fully funded research & engineering programme in Cambridge, UK, where residents take on concrete cybersecurity & hardware projects to mitigate the risks of frontier AI.
Our mission: back the people securing frontier AI at the hardware and cyber layer, before its capabilities outpace its defenses.
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THE PROGRAMME
Beyond individual projects, the programme will also feature skill-building workshops, talks from leading researchers, and potential physical access to a cluster in Cambridge.
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SUPPORT
A generous compute budget, competitive stipend, meals during work hours, and full visa and travel support, as well as 1-1 community health support for overall well-being.
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OUR RESIDENTS
Engineers, security researchers, hardware and firmware designers, cryptographers, red-teamers, ML researchers, infrastructure engineers, and technical policy specialists.
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DATES & LOCATION
The Frontier AI Security Residency will be held in Cambridge, UK, for 8-weeks, starting on October 12th, 2026. 6+ months of extension funding and incubation grants also available.
Why this residency
Frontier AI capabilities are advancing faster than frontier AI security.
We are seeing increasingly capable AI models, being deployed more widely than ever before, and the hardware and cyber security of frontier AI has not kept pace. Securing the ever growing attack surface for frontier AI across internal and external deployments is one of the hardest and most consequential open problems in the field.
The Frontier AI Security residency (FASR) backs engineers and researchers to tackle concrete problems here: verifying what AI compute is doing, keeping models and systems secure, and building the mechanisms that let claims about a system be checked rather than trusted.
Tackle open, hard problems at the frontier of AI security & verification.
Residents will work directly with our expert mentors from leading AI hardware and cyber security teams on concrete projects, building deep expertise across both the domains and a portfolio of outputs. We want to back talent across hardware security, cyber security, and policy.
The residency is a chance to take on genuinely open problems, with ERA providing the infrastructure so you can focus on the work that matters. The field is still emerging — you will be one of the few people working on it, with a bearing on both its direction and the trajectory of advanced AI.
Transformative research & engineering work doesn’t happen in isolation.
ERA has run programmes in Cambridge for over half a decade. We know that the best work emerges from daily collaboration, spontaneous conversations, and being embedded in a thriving intellectual community — not from working alone.
Over two months, you will live and work alongside fellow residents, full-time researchers, and the security community in and around Cambridge, building deep and lasting connections. We will actively strengthen ties across the cohort and the wider community across our partner orgs.