Witt Lab PI wins Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellowship

The Oxford Witt Lab (OWL) PI Dr. Christian Schroeder de Witt has won a Schmidt AI2050 Early Career Fellowship as one of 21 awardees selected globally this year. See announcements by Forbes, the University of Oxford, and on the Schmidt Sciences website.

Schroeder de Witt receives the 3-year fellowship valued at $500,000 for defining the field of multi-agent security and, in particular, his research agenda on undetectable threats. In the coming years, powerful AI systems will work together, creating new security risks that may be practically infeasible—or even, in some regimes, theoretically impossible—to detect, undermining security approaches based on anomaly detection alone. Schroeder de Witt’s project explores how AI agents might exploit concealed capabilities, secretly share hidden messages, or carry out invisible attacks—and how to prevent them through secure-by-design architectures. The program blends theory and experiments to establish formal detectability limits and develop practical mitigations, including hardened interaction protocols, evaluation and red-team playbooks, and design patterns for resilient multi-agent systems. By acting now, the project aims to keep deployment practice ahead of emerging multi-agent threats.

Christian previously won the Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship. across the UK. The prestigious 5-year award funded by the UK Department for Innovation, Science, and Technology was only awarded to 12 UK early career researchers across computer science and engineering this year.

Schroeder de Witt received the RAEng award for his work on mitigating GenAI threats for multi-agent security, proposing innovative research with applications across deepfake detection, cybersecurity, and embodied systems safety.

Please find the official RAEng press release here.