As artificial intelligence moves beyond controlled settings and into dynamic, uncertain and socially complex environments, new questions arise about how these systems understand their surroundings, act autonomously, and interact with people. Rather than concentrating intelligence in a single complex system, the four-year EIC Pathfinder project EMERGE took a different approach. It considered the simplest possible artificial agents, such as small robots in a swarm, components of a robotic body, or connected devices. Individually, each unit may possess limited intelligence and information. Together, however, from their interactions, sharing information and coordinating their behaviour, they can establish a representation of shared existence, environment and goals, which the project calls collaborative awareness.

SafeSeal is an AI-driven watermarking technology designed to protect large language model (LLM) outputs from unauthorized use while preserving text quality and readability. The system embeds detectable watermarks through context-aware synonym substitutions while using named entity recognition to preserve critical information and maintain semantic integrity. Performance testing demonstrated a BERTScore of 0.981, an entity similarity score of 0.962, and a watermark detection rate of 95.1%, indicating strong content fidelity and reliable verification. Potential applications include intellectual property protection, AI content authentication, compliance, and secure deployment of commercial LLMs. The patent-pending technology is at TRL 3 and available for licensing.