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Horizon Europe Cluster 4 — Twin (Green+Digital) Transition for Industry

Safe and Efficient Frontier AI

Funds a €44M frontier-AI project that builds safer, more efficient European models with lower computational demands.

ScheduledEuropean CommissionEU

Frontier AI models could unlock major scientific and economic opportunities, but their energy use, computational cost and safety risks are growing quickly. This topic funds European research that advances frontier-model capability while tackling those constraints directly.

The project can develop and train a state-of-the-art multimodal model with tool use, reasoning and autonomous problem-solving

Advance a sovereign European frontier AI model toward state-of-the-art performance with multimodal and agentic capabilities, while developing methods that reduce computational demand and make advanced AI safer. Research may cover compression, distillation, efficient architectures, lower-cost training and inference, automated safety testing, interpretability, misalignment, reward hacking, encoded reasoning, adversarial attacks, jailbreaks, backdoors and agentic-AI risks. Start at TRL 2 and reach TRL 4, involve the European AI research community, attract talent, connect with RAISE, AI Factories and Data Labs, and allocate cohesion work with ADRA and the GenAI4EU central Hub.

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.18 Mar 2027
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.0%
Funding pooliThe total budget available across all awards in this round.€44M

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Last verified: 25 Aug 2026Funder reference: HORIZON-CL4-2027-04-DIGITAL-EMERGING-11Source: ec.europa.eu