"DARPA Awards $14m to Seven Teams in AI Cyber Challenge"

The AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has officially awarded seven semifinalists $2m each at DEFCON 32 where the agency hosted an immersive experience to underscore the real-world stakes of the competition.  AIxCC aims to find a cyber reasoning system to successfully find and fix vulnerabilities in open-source software.  The seven teams announced as semifinalists who will advance to the final competition include 42-b3yond-6ug, all_you_need_is_a_fuzzing_brain, Lacrosse, Shellphish, Team Atlanta, Theori, and Trail of Bits.  In collaboration with the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), AIxCC asked competitors to design novel AI systems to secure the open-source software that undergirds everything from financial systems to public utilities and the healthcare ecosystem. For the AIxCC Semifinal Competition, teams tried to develop Cyber Reasoning Systems capable of automatically processing a set of Challenge Projects.  The goal was to find and fix Challenge Project vulnerabilities.  AIxCC noted that it received nearly 40 Cyber Reasoning Systems and tested each against an identical corpus of Challenge Projects that had a basis in real-world, open-source projects that are critical to industry, national security, and the public: Jenkins, Linux kernel, Nginx, SQLite3, and Apache Tika.  There will be finals next year to see how much the teams can mature their technology.  The AIxCC Final Competition will be held in August 2025. 

Infosecurity Magazine reports: "DARPA Awards $14m to Seven Teams in AI Cyber Challenge"