“The AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) is a two-year competition aimed at driving innovation at the nexus of AI and cybersecurity to create a new generation of cybersecurity tools — AI systems that can automatically secure the critical software code that underpins everything from financial systems to public utilities — with the semifinal competition at DEF CON in 2024 and the final competition at DEF CON in 2025.”

DARPAPolicymaker

U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, AI Cyber Challenge program

AIxCC ran on schedule: semifinals at DEF CON 32 (August 2024) and finals at DEF CON 33, with winners announced August 8, 2025 (Team Atlanta, $4M). In the scored final round the autonomous cyber reasoning systems found the large majority of injected vulnerabilities across 54 million lines of code (77% by the initial tally, later revised by DARPA to 86%), patched most of what they found, and uncovered 18 real zero-days; four of the seven systems were released open source.