Advancing research in multi-agent communication and coordination.
This pilot program supports researchers in academia and nonprofits who are exploring how multiple intelligent agents communicate and coordinate with one another.
We expect fully autonomous and agentic AI systems to increasingly interact with each other, acting and negotiating on our behalf. These autonomous systems will have varying incentives, capabilities, and settings – which means their interactions will often be spontaneous and ad hoc. This raises questions about how these agents will communicate, coordinate, and behave – and where break downs may occur.
Our goal is to observe and measure the evolution of inter-agent communication and coordination, stability of predefined protocols, and social dynamics among AI agents in complex real-world scenarios and challenges.
The pilot program will focus initially on two areas:
- Advancing foundational research on multi-agent communication and coordination.
- Building an open-source platform where researchers can design and implement realistic challenges and test how multi-agent systems work together in complex, high-pressure environments.
The platform will host realistic, demanding challenges that require agents with diverse training and capabilities to collaborate in order to succeed. These environments are designed to surface how communication and coordination strategies emerge, adapt, and sometimes diverge from earlier patterns under pressure.
This program will produce published papers and other open research artifacts, insights for the agents research community, and a testbed for developing and running multi-agent challenges.
If successful, this program will enable more robust and trustworthy agent design, as well as more effective teams and ad hoc collections of AI agents that cooperate while remaining legible to humans.
Check back for funding opportunities in 2026. Inquiries should be directed to [email protected].
