Amazon Security call for proposals: Fall 2026
Amazon funds AI security research with gifts of no more than $80,000 on average, plus AWS credits. Proposals close 4 November 2026.
The Amazon Security call for proposals is a Fall 2026 round of the Amazon Research Awards. It funds AI research on security problems. Selected principal investigators may receive unrestricted funds, no more than $80,000 USD on average, and AWS Promotional Credits, no more than $40,000 USD on average. They also get training, including AWS tutorials and hands on sessions with Amazon scientists and engineers. Awards are one time unrestricted gifts. The budget should list expected costs in USD and should not include administrative overhead. The awards panel sets the final amount. Decision letters go out in February 2027.
The call asks for work on topics such as open source security, verifying software supply chain trust, memory safety in legacy code, package and dependency security, authentication for AI agents, and vulnerability detection and remediation using agentic AI. It also lists hardware and firmware security, formal verification, and public benchmarks for security in spec driven code generation.
The principal investigator must be full time faculty at an accredited academic institution, or a permanent researcher at a non governmental organisation with recognised legal status equivalent to 501(c)(3) status in the United States. They must be at or above the age of majority. Each principal investigator may submit only one proposal to the Amazon Research Awards in this call period. Amazon employees cannot receive an award. The rules also bar recent Amazon staff, their immediate family or household, paid government employees other than at an accredited academic institution, and people under US export controls or sanctions. The program is void in Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and the Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk regions of Ukraine.
Proposals should follow the proposal template and are encouraged to be at most 4 pages, not counting appendices. You submit through the button on the call page, which asks you to sign up or log in. Amazon Security says it will judge potential impact on the research community and the quality of the scientific content.
The submission period is 1 October to 4 November 2026 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time. The Fall 2026 call list on Amazon Science marks this round as open.