About this CFP
At Amazon, we aim to advance innovations that solve some of the most challenging problems in information security. We are seeking to fund AI research on the following topics:
- Trustworthy and reliable agentic AI for security operations, including methodologies for evaluating AI agents in security use cases
- Threat, intrusion, and anomaly detection in agentic AI systems and cloud environments
- Building and optimizing foundation models through pre-training, post-training, fine-tuning, and other techniques to improve performance on security tasks
- Security of agentic AI systems, including securing toolchains, securing frameworks, solutions for confused deputy in delegated agent behaviors, and so forth
- Securing generative AI and foundation models, including securing training data content, anonymization, semantic differential privacy, preventing data leakage from trained models, and so forth
- Vulnerability detection and remediation using agentic AI
- AI-powered incident response: from human collaboration to full automation
- Reinforcement learning for information security
- Scalable and efficient graph modeling and anomaly detection on graphs
- Learning with limited/noisy labels and weakly supervised learning
- AI for malware analysis and detection, with a focus on cloud environments or devices
- AI-assisted secure code generation and security enhancement of existing codebases
- Generative AI for cloud infrastructure compliance
- AI agent access control, including conditional scoped roles in authentication and authorization
Timeline
Submission period: October 1 — November 5, 2025 (11:59PM Pacific Time)
Decision letters will be sent out in February 2026
Awards Details
Selected Principal Investigators (PIs) may receive the following:
- Unrestricted funds, no more than $80,000 USD on average
- AWS Promotional Credits, no more than $40,000 USD on average
- Training resources, including AWS tutorials and hands-on sessions with Amazon scientists and engineers
Awards are structured as one-time unrestricted gifts. The budget should include a list of expected costs specified in USD, and should not include administrative overhead costs. The final award amount will be determined by the awards panel.
Eligibility requirements
Please refer to the ARA program rules on the rules and eligibility page.
Proposal requirements
Proposals should be prepared according to the proposal template and are encouraged to be a maximum of 3 pages, not including Appendices.
Selection Criteria
AI for Information Security will make the funding decisions based on the potential impact to the research community and the quality of the scientific content.
Expectations from recipients
To the extent deemed reasonable, award recipients may acknowledge support from ARA (e.g., (“Research reported in this [publication/press release] was supported by an Amazon Research Award, [Cycle /Year].“). Award recipients will inform ARA of publications, presentations, code and data releases, blogs/social media posts, and other speaking engagements referencing the results of the supported research or the Award. Award recipients are expected to provide updates and feedback to ARA via surveys or reports on the status of their research. Award recipients will have an opportunity to work with ARA on an informational statement about the awarded project that may be used to generate visibility for their institutions and ARA.