DARPA, the Canadian Department of National Defence, and the U.K. Ministry of Defence will collaboratively pursue research, development, test, and evaluation technologies for artificial intelligence (AI), cyber, resilient systems, and information domain-related technologies.
The rapid pace of technology development has made expanding and codifying this trilateral partnership essential to meeting future challenges in an ever-changing geopolitical environment. This effort will further leverage relevant research programs among all nations and reduce duplication of efforts.
In addition to strengthening international partnerships, DARPA’s goal is to continue reducing technological risks so new capabilities can transition into operational use as quickly as possible. One research project already underway in the collaboration is the Cyber Agents for Security Testing and Learning Environments (CASTLE) program, which trains AI to autonomously defend networks against advanced persistent cyber threats. Other research and development areas of interest include defining and creating trustworthy AI systems, even in the face of attacks by skilled, high-resource adversaries; protecting, detecting attacks on, and measuring the health of the information domain; and producing tools and techniques that result in more resilient and secure systems, such as rapid certification of software.
In another example, researchers are cooperating to develop interoperable defensive cyber capabilities. As malicious actors use artificial intelligence to increase the pace and volume of cyber attacks, human operators alone cannot keep up. Test beds that simulate a network architecture will be developed to enable artificial-intelligence defensive software to quickly assess, categorize, and generate a response to cyber threats, enabling cyber operators to rapidly make decisions to defend against malicious attacks.
DARPA convened a symposium over the summer of 2024, which included representatives from across the U.K. and Canadian governments, the U.S. Executive Office of the President’s National Security Council and Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Health to begin planning collaborative efforts.
The Ministry of Defense’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) will be the lead agency for the U.K. and the Department of National Defense’s science and technology organization, the Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC), will be the lead organization on behalf of Canada.