AI Forward

Reimagining the future of artificial intelligence for national security

AI Forward is DARPA’s initiative to explore new directions for artificial intelligence (AI) research that will result in trustworthy systems for national security missions. To initiate AI Forward, DARPA hosted two workshops in the summer of 2023 at which participants brainstormed new directions for the field.

Approximately 200 participants from across the commercial sector, academia, and government attended and generated ideas that inform DARPA’s next phase of AI exploratory projects, known as AI Exploration opportunities (AIEs). AIEs are a key component of the agency’s broader AI investment strategy aimed at ensuring the United States maintains an advantage in this critical and rapidly accelerating technology area. 

AIEs constitute a series of unique funding opportunities that use streamlined contracting procedures and funding mechanisms to achieve a start date within three months of an opportunity announcement. Researchers then work to establish the feasibility of new AI concepts within 18 months of award. Through this nimble approach to exploring new AI concepts, DARPA aims to outpace competing, global AI science and technology discovery efforts.

What does it mean to be trustworthy?

DARPA’s Information Innovation Office Director Dr. Kathleen Fisher presents on trustworthy AI at the DARPA Forward event in Pullman, Washington on September 13, 2022.

Despite progress in the field, AI still requires significant investment and advancement to develop technology that reliably operates, interacts appropriately with people, and meets the most pressing national security and societal needs in an ethical manner.

DARPA seeks qualified researchers and experts to join the agency and help define the future of AI technology.

Trustworthy AI research thrusts

DARPA experts estimate that research in the following areas will be essential to creating trustworthy technology:

• Foundational theory, to understand the art of the possible, bound the limits of particular system instantiations, and inform guardrails for AI systems in challenging domains such as national security;
• AI engineering, to predictably build systems that work as intended in the real world and not just in the lab; and
• Human-AI teaming, to enable systems to serve as fluent, intuitive, trustworthy teammates to people with various backgrounds.

Building on 60+ years of AI research

DARPA has been generating groundbreaking research and development for 65 years – leading to game-changing military capabilities as well as icons of modern society such as initiating the research field that rendered self-driving cars, and developing the technology that lead to Apple’s Siri.

Since 2018 through the AI Next campaign, we invested more than $2 billion to advance AI for national security purposes.

Today, roughly 70% of DARPA’s current programs benefit from AI and machine learning technology. We’re investing in more than 30 programs aimed at the exploration and advancement of a full range of AI techniques. These include symbolic reasoning, statistical machine learning, meta-cognition, explanation and assurance, and hybrid methods.

We want to push beyond second-wave machine learning techniques toward contextual reasoning capabilities, so that machines could be more than just tools, and function as true partners.

Building on the success of AI Next, the AI Forward initiative focuses on trustworthiness for these systems. This focus will be critical to developing technology that reliably operates, interacts appropriately with people, and meets the most pressing national security and societal needs in an ethical manner.