AI Scientist

What are AI Scientists?

AI is reshaping the scientific landscape. While AI for science has been central to recent scientific progress, emerging capabilities point to an even more foundational shift in scientific discovery: AI Scientists designed to conduct the entire research process without continuous human intervention.

These systems could generate hypotheses, design experiments, run them in automated labs, interpret results, and iterate on findings. If successful, AI Scientists would allow us to explore far more research directions than humans alone – running experiments continuously, spotting non-obvious patterns, and pursuing ideas we might never consider. This could lead to a massive increase in the speed and scale of societally important breakthroughs.

ARIA’s work on AI Scientists

When we issued our call for proposals on AI Scientists – autonomous systems capable of reasoning, planning, and executing experiments – we received 245 applications. It was the largest response to any ARIA call to date, describing work that would have been almost unimaginable just a year ago.

To reflect both the scale of interest and the pace of progress in this emerging field, we have doubled our investment from £3 million to £6 million, supporting 12 projects that span frontier organisations and ambitious new entrants.

Explore the funded projects

AI for Breakthroughs

In parallel to AI Scientists, we're also exploring AI for breakthroughs – exploring how AI tools can help ARIA surface promising research directions, evaluate programme proposals, and identify blind spots. If AI Scientists become significant creators of knowledge, the ability to direct them toward breakthrough opportunities will be as important as the systems themselves. We're building these capabilities now.