Microsoft announced the External Red Team Alliance (EXTRA), a formalized global extension of its AI Red Team, to address a disconnect where high-risk AI failure modes requiring deep domain expertise, multilingual context, or regional understanding cannot be fully replicated by a single internal team. The initiative includes a global academic network, with Microsoft’s AI Red Team providing unrestricted gifts to 18 university labs spanning six continents to support research on unresolved AI safety questions. Supporting institutions include Carnegie Mellon University Security and Privacy Institute (CyLab), Georgetown University – Georgetown Security Lab (SecLab), Harvard University Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (BKC), Howard University Research Institute for Tactical Autonomy (RITA), Indian Institute of Technology Madras – Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI), Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology – KAIST Web Security & Privacy (WSP) Lab, New York University – NYU Alignment Research Group (ARG), Northeastern University Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDS2) Lab, University College London – UCL Information Security Research Group (UCL ISec), University of Cagliari Pattern Recognition and Applications (PRA) Lab, University of California – Berkeley Risk and Security Lab; Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence (CRDI), University of Melbourne Artificial Intelligence Assurance Lab, and University of Pretoria Data Science for Social Impact (DSFSI) Research Group.