AI for Information 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 AI for Information Security call for proposals is a Fall 2026 round of the Amazon Research Awards. Amazon asks for AI research on hard problems in information security. 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.
The call page lists topics such as trustworthy agentic AI for security operations, access governance for AI agents, threat and anomaly detection, AI powered incident response, and vulnerability detection and remediation. It also names security of agentic systems and of generative models, reinforcement learning for information security, graph anomaly detection, learning with limited labels, malware analysis in cloud or device settings, secure code generation, and generative AI for cloud infrastructure compliance.
The principal investigator must be a full time faculty member 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.
The submission period is 1 October to 4 November 2026 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time. Decision letters go out in February 2027. Proposals should follow the proposal template and are encouraged to stay within 4 pages, not counting appendices. Submit through the call page, which points to the Amazon academic research portal.
Amazon says funding decisions rest on the potential impact to the research community and the quality of the scientific content.