DARPA and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) have jointly developed AI Forge to catalyze breakthroughs in AI for national security, working in close collaboration with the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The program is focused on aligning government, academia, and industry around forward-looking foundational research to accelerate advances in AI interpretability, AI control, and adversarial robustness. AI Forge hypothesizes that pre-competitive AI research in these thrust areas can accelerate the adoption of AI innovations by industry and federal agencies.
AI Forge aims to accelerate progress towards AI that is significantly more reliable and predictable in high-stakes settings, understandable to its operators, and secure in contested environments. It also envisions building a durable research ecosystem around priority AI challenges and enabling a more robust exchange of talent and ideas across universities, frontier AI companies, and government than is possible today.
AI Forge will establish a forum – comprised of industry, university, and government participants – to identify, fund, and manage university-led research efforts aimed at challenges defined in the AI Forge Critical AI Challenges for National Security report. The forum will be administered by a nonprofit.
AI Forge RFI Response
Nationwide academic mobilization to close the “mission-ready AI” gap
DARPA received nearly 130 responses to the AI Forge Request for Information (RFI). This robust response from top-tier academic institutions validates the urgent, nationwide demand for a unique public-private ecosystem dedicated to closing the “mission-ready AI gap” for national security and solving operationally-relevant AI challenges. AI Forge’s structure of fast-paced, high-risk/high-reward, university-led project ventures is designed to channel this mobilized talent toward the three priority areas outlined in America’s AI Action Plan: AI interpretability, AI control, and adversarial robustness.
For frontier AI companies, AI Forge offers a mission-grounded pathway to expand national security credibility, align with U.S. policy priorities, and help shape the verification infrastructure for the next generation of AI systems. Most importantly, it allows AI companies to leverage the brainpower of the nation’s top university talent to tackle pre-competitive challenges, advancing the readiness of future national security deployment stacks for the demands of high-stakes missions.
