White House launches $27 million AI-based contest to secure govt systems against hacks
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The contest signals official attempts to tackle an emerging threat that experts are still trying to fully grasp.
PHOTO: REUTERS
SAN FRANCISCO - The White House on Wednesday said it has launched a multimillion-dollar cyber contest to spur the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to find and f ix security flaws in the United States government infrastructure,
“Cyber security is a race between offence and defence,” said Ms Anne Neuberger, the US government’s deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology.
“We know malicious actors are already using AI to accelerate identifying vulnerabilities or build malicious software.”
Numerous US organisations, from healthcare groups to manufacturing companies to government institutions, have been targets of hacking in recent years, and officials have warned of future threats, especially from foreign adversaries.
Ms Neuberger’s comments about AI echo those made by Canada’s cyber-security chief Samy Khoury in July. He said his agency had seen AI being used for everything from creating phishing e-mails to writing malicious computer code to spreading disinformation.
The two-year contest includes around US$20 million (S$27 million) in rewards and will be led by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the US government body in charge of creating technologies for national security, the White House said.
Alphabet’s Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI – the US technology firms at the forefront of the AI revolution – will make their systems available for the challenge, the government said.
The contest signals official attempts to tackle an emerging threat that experts are still trying to fully grasp. In the past year, US firms have launched a range of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT that allow users to create convincing videos, images, texts, and computer code. Chinese companies have launched similar models to catch up.
The experts say such tools could make it far easier to, for instance, conduct mass hacking campaigns or create fake profiles on social media to spread false information and propaganda.
“Our goal with the Darpa AI challenge is to catalyse a larger community of cyber defenders who use the participating AI models to race faster – using generative AI to bolster our cyber defences,” Ms Neuberger said.
The Open Source Security Foundation, a US group of experts trying to improve open source software security, will be in charge of ensuring the “winning software code is put to use right away”, the US government said. REUTERS
