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Why DARPA is Funding an AI-Powered Bug-Spotting Challenge


Somewhere in America's Defense Department, the DARPA R&D agency is running a two-year contest to write an AI-powered program "that can scan millions of lines of open-source code, identify security flaws and fix them, all without human intervention," reports the Washington Post. [Alternate URL h...

Somewhere in America's Defense Department, the DARPA R&D agency is running a two-year contest to write an AI-powered program "that can scan millions of lines of open-source code, identify security flaws and fix them, all without human intervention," reports the Washington Post. As a result, poorly maintained free code has been at the root of some of the most expensive cybersecurity breaches of all time, including the 2017 Equifax disaster that exposed the personal information of half of all Americans. "Under the terms of the DARPA contest, all finalists must release their programs as open source," the article points out, "so that software vendors and consumers will be able to run them."

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