RAINNO Joins the KnoWare Launch in Trondheim
On 9 to 11 June, the RAINNO team travelled to Trondheim, Norway, to participate in the official Kick-Off Meeting of KnoWare, one of the most ambitious Horizon Europe projects currently underway in the field of AI governance. Hosted by our consortium Coordinator SINTEF in Trondheim, the three-day meeting (9–11 June 2026) gathered all 13 partners from 7 countries for the first time to align on the project’s vision, structure our collaboration, and set the stage for three years of groundbreaking work.
What is KnoWare and why does it matter?
General Purpose AI models, the large-scale systems behind tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and others, have an unusual and unsettling property: as they grow in size and complexity, they spontaneously develop new abilities that no one explicitly programmed. These emerging capabilities can appear seemingly out of nowhere, with significant implications for safety, society, and regulation.
Until now, the world has reacted to these surprises after the fact. KnoWare changes that. The project develops the first scientific methodology to detect early signals that a new AI capability is forming, before it fully emerges. The concept, called capabilities prefiguration, gives AI providers, organisations, and EU regulators the lead time they need to assess risks and act responsibly.
With a budget of €3,999,862.50 and a 36-month timeline, KnoWare will deliver eight Key Exploitable Results ranging from an open-source tool suite for AI assessment to a regulatory alignment roadmap directly supporting EU AI Act implementation, validated through four real-world use cases:(a) energy & commodity trade, (b) biological hazards & pandemic prevention, (c) maritime cybersecurity & critical infrastructures, and (d) chemical hazards in food value chain.
RAINNO’s role: making KnoWare heard, understood, and adopted
RAINNO is leading KnoWare’s entire impact strategy, communication, dissemination, exploitation, and ecosystem engagement.
From day one, we are shaping how the project tells its story: building its public identity, coordinating the communication strategy across all partners, and managing its presence on social media and beyond. We also make sure KnoWare’s findings reach the right people (academics, researchers, policymakers, industry, general public) in a language they can actually use.
On the exploitation side, we are mapping which tools and frameworks have real potential beyond the project, while building the pathways to get them there. Furthermore, in collaboration with KnoWare’s partner Confederation of Laboratories for Artificial Intelligence Research in Europe (CAIRNE), we are actively connecting KnoWare with the institutions that shape European AI governance, the AI Office, ADRA, the GenAI4EU Hub, so that the project’s outputs don’t just get published. They get adopted.