By Helen Woeste
AIxCC Competition Background & Results:
In 2023, DARPA announced a two-year long competition called the Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) with the goal to safeguard open source software used in critical infrastructure throughout America. The intent is to hasten the development of open source AI tooling that can assist developers with finding and fixing bugs in live software with minimal cost. Open source is a drastically underfunded and underresourced form of infrastructure. It therefore presents an exciting, practical target, and opportunity for the research and development of AI in cybersecurity. Additionally, open source’s publicly observable code is ideal for competition and collaboration.
AIxCC was run in collaboration with ARPA-H and supported with contributions from Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, with additional consulting around open source provided by the Linux Foundation and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). This research was developed with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The competition consisted of two rounds, the Semifinal Competition (ASC) and the Final Competition (AFC), where cash prizes from a pot of $30,500,000 were distributed. For the ASC, 42 team submissions were accepted across two tracks; the Open Track and the Small Business Track, which required an additional technical paper submission. The top seven teams moved forward to the AFC which was set up to mimic a real world CI/CD pipeline. The scoring algorithm was also designed to highlight behaviors that would make the competing systems more useful to developers. At the conclusion of AFC, the top three teams were Team Atlanta, Trail of Bits, and Theori.
