The U.S. National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have developed a research and development program to catalyze breakthroughs in artificial intelligence for national security. The agencies worked in close collaboration with the Center for AI Standards and Innovation at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The program, AI Forge, aims to accelerate the progress toward AI that is significantly more reliable and predictable in high-stakes settings, understandable to its operators, and secure in contested environments. The program also will build a durable research ecosystem around priority AI challenges and enable a more robust exchange of talent and ideas between universities, frontier AI companies, and government.
“We’re taking a unified approach to create breakthroughs in AI for national security,” Matthew Marge, DARPA program manager for AI Forge, said. “The frontier AI companies build and commercialize massive, high-capability models and computers. Universities are engines of deep, foundational research and, importantly, they cultivate our nation’s future talent. At the intersection is high-risk, high-reward research that requires both massive scale and deep, mission-driven work – something that is difficult to pursue in either environment alone. With AI Forge, we’re looking to build an ambitious new ecosystem that bridges this gap.”
The program will launch 15 research challenges in three core areas: AI interpretability, AI control and adversarial robustness.