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Horizon Europe Cluster 3 — Civil Security & Disaster Resilience

Horizon Cyber: Robust & Private AI Systems

Funds EU teams hardening AI systems against adversarial attacks and building privacy-preserving AI for sensitive government and enterprise use.

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AI is now woven into cybersecurity, critical infrastructure and decision-making — which makes AI itself a target. Attackers manipulate inputs, poison the data a model trains on, or hide backdoors that only trigger later. This topic funds work that makes AI systems hold up against that.

A winning project can go after robustness, detection, or privacy — the call asks for one or more, not all three.

Building AI models and systems that hold up against adversarial manipulation — attacks that poison training data, hide backdoors, or trick a model into misclassifying — and building privacy-preserving AI that governments and enterprises can run in-house without exposing the underlying data. A proposal can target one or more of: robust models, new defences against emerging attack families, detection of poisoned or backdoored training data, or Private AI using techniques like federated learning, secure aggregation, computation on encrypted data, and secure inference.

CycleiHow often this grant runs — e.g. annually, on a rolling basis, or a one-off call.Annual
Next deadlineiThe next date applications are due. Rolling means you can apply any time.15 Sept 2026
Decision timeiTypical time from the deadline to the funder's decision.22 weeks
Project durationiHow long the funded work is expected to run.
Award typeiThe form of funding — grant, equity, loan, tax credit, etc.Grant
Match fundingiThe share of project costs you must cover yourself. 0% = fully funded.30%
Funding pooliThe total budget available across all awards in this round.€21.2M

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Last verified: 25 Aug 2026Funder reference: HORIZON-CL3-2026-02-CS-ECCC-02Source: ec.europa.eu