WASHINGTON — The Army is poised to take its next step toward potentially unleashing defensive AI agents on its networks as the service plans to award contracts to two companies by the end of the week, a key official said.
“The one that we plan to award on Friday is our take action element. So essentially, how are we not only autonomously detecting a potential adversary? How are we now doing something — having an autonomous response within prescribed parameters of a human operator, or even in conjunction with that?” Brandon Pugh, the service’s principal cyber advisor, said at the annual AUSA conference on Monday. “That is extraordinary. Something we haven’t done and we’re very excited about.”
Pugh declined to provide the names of the awardees ahead of the Friday announcement.
The network AI effort, dubbed Project Griffin, stemmed from a tabletop exercise with top industry executives and service leaders. The Army published a commercial solutions opening in August, spurring 108 submissions that were narrowed to 10 finalists.
Pugh explained that the Army has tools, such as its Panoptic Junction capability, that he said have a nearly 90 percent success rate at identifying malicious activity on the network. But they don’t currently have a way at remediating or remedying those threats, especially with limited humans.
Despite the award on Friday, officials said agents won’t begin work on government networks immediately.
“For us, it’s going to be: Are we as humans ready to let the agent actually take action? You think about that for how many years a human has been the person making the patch, remediating something, so we’re walking ourselves through what does it mean to have an agent to do that work and then how do you check that agent’s work. So a lot still to do in this space,” Lt. Gen. Christopher Eubank, commander of Army Cyber Command, told reporters at the conference.
He added that the service is working with companies to understand where what they can do in this space and determine what does it actually mean to take action, noting they’re working “hand-in-hand with the companies to build out what it looks like” and then put it through a deliberate process on the Army’s portion of the network. The two companies awarded could work in tandem on the effort or do their own thing.
Pugh said that using a commercial solutions opening to gather ideas was actually suggested by members of industry, as a way to keep responses broad as opposed to prescribing what companies should provide to the Army. Industry oftentimes has capabilities or ideas that aren’t even on the government’s radar, he said.
Given the big aperture, the Army wants to figure out what the companies are capable of providing as they put it through its paces.
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