A two-year competition for professionals in artificial intelligence is being held by DARPA, the Pentagon organization that promotes moonshot technological ideas, to develop novel methods of enhancing global cybersecurity.
On Wednesday, the competition will begin at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. It challenges competitors to develop tools that anybody can use to find and patch software flaws to prevent hackers from taking advantage of them. At the Def Con hacker convention in Las Vegas in August 2025, it will formally come to an end and award a total of $18.5 million to victors in various categories.
Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Arati Prabhakar gave reporters a preview of the competition on Tuesday, calling it “a clarion call for multiple types of creative individuals and groups in order to bolster the security of vital software that American families, businesses, and all of our society depend on.”
In recent years, hackers have attacked American organizations. Allegedly employed for Chinese and Russian intelligence services, these hackers have repeatedly breached federal agencies during the Biden administration alone. They frequently use inventive methods to get into widely-used software programs and subsequently use that access to spy on government operations around the world.
Criminal ransomware hackers typically target hospitals and schools, which are in charge of their own security. They lock up their victims’ systems and force them to stop operating.
According to a DARPA representative, the victorious technologies will be made available to the general public in an effort to perhaps enhance cybersecurity globally.
The challenge, according to Perri Adams, the DARPA program manager in charge of it, was created to aid cybersecurity professionals in fending against an increasing number of inventive hackers.
“Protecting a complex web of technology falls to cyber defenders. They also lack the tools necessary for security at this level today. So, in recent years, we’ve seen hackers taking advantage of this situation,” she stated.