In order to reinforce European leadership in safe and secure AI technology, we are proposing a virtual center of excellence on safe and secure AI that will address major challenges hampering the deployment of AI technology. These grand challenges are fundamental in nature. Addressing them in a sustainable manner requires a lighthouse rooted in scientific excellence and rigorous methods. We will develop a strategic research agenda which is supported by research programmes that focus on “technical robustness and safety”, “privacy preserving techniques and infrastructures” and “human agency and oversight”. Furthermore, we focus our efforts to detect, prevent and mitigate threats and enable recovery from harm by 3 grand challenges: “Robustness guarantees and certification”, “Private and robust collaborative learning at scale” and “Human-in-the-loop decision making: Integrated governance to ensure meaningful oversight” that cut across 6 use cases: health, autonomous driving, robotics, cybersecurity, multi-media, and document intelligence. Throughout our project, we seek to integrate robust technical approaches with legal and ethical principles supported by meaningful and effective governance architectures to nurture and sustain the development and deployment of AI technology that serves and promotes foundational European values. Our initiative builds on and expands the internationally recognized, highly successful and fully operational network of excellence ELLIS (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems). We build ELSA on its 3 pillars: research programmes, a set of research units, and a PhD/postdoc programme, thereby connecting a network of over 100 organizations and more than 337 ELLIS fellows and scholars (113 ERC grants) committed to shared standards of excellence. We will not only establish a virtual center of excellence, but all our activities will be also inclusive and open to input, interactions and collaboration of AI researchers and industrial partners in order to drive the entire field forward.