The White House on Wednesday released a statement saying that it had come up with a multimillion-dollar cyber contest to stimulate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in order to find out and fix flaws in the security system of the United States government infrastructure.
“Cybersecurity is a race between offence and defence,” said Anne Neuberger, the U.S. government’s deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology.
“We know malicious actors are already using AI to accelerate identifying vulnerabilities or build malicious software,” she added in a statement to Reuters.
In recent times, several organisations in the United States, from healthcare groups to manufacturing firms and government institutions, have been a victim of hacking attacks.
Neuberger’s comments about artificial intelligence were somewhat similar to those made by Canada’s cybersecurity head Samy Khoury last month.
He said that his agency had witnessed AI being deployed for things like creating phishing emails, writing malicious computer code and spreading disinformation.
The White House released a statement saying that the two-year contest includes around $20 million in rewards and will be ushered by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the United States government body which is in charge of creating technologies for national security.
The government said that the tech giants at the forefront of the AI revolution which include Alphabet’s Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI, will make their systems available for the challenge.
“Our goal with the DARPA AI challenge is to catalyze a larger community of cyber defenders who use the participating AI models to race faster – using generative AI to bolster our cyber defences,” Neuberger said.
The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), a US group of experts attempting to enhance open source software security, will be in charge of guaranteeing the “winning software code is put to use right away,” the US government said.
(With inputs from agencies)
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