DARPA is soliciting innovative proposals that leverage: abstraction of physics based reduced order modeling, AI-driven simulation with edge compute, advances in online model-predictive control and online dynamics learning, recurrence quantification analysis, simulation with live sensor data, and game theory / theory of behavior.

The DISCORD program aims to develop an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-native approach for rapid generation of tactical options from both live sensor data and high-fidelity simulation. The goal is to provide commanders with a portfolio of diverse strategies that can pivot dynamically in response to evolving conditions. DISCORD is designed to produce explainable outcomes that human operators and commanders can validate, fostering trust in AI-driven decision support.

DISCORD is intended to continuously adapt to changes in the operational environment, producing robust strategies that can pivot dynamically in response to evolving conditions. By discovering a wide range of superior and genuinely diverse strategies, rather than just a single optimized solution, the engine will help create true strategic flexibility. Importantly, this flexibility will afford commanders the power and freedom to exercise their own tactical judgment—born of hard-earned experience, training, and operational art—in ways that adversaries cannot poison, stymie, or accurately predict.

DISCORD is a 24-month program organized into two 12-month phases. DARPA anticipates selecting multiple performers. The DARPA DISCORD effort implements Ender’s Foundry, one of several warfighting Pace-Setting Projects (PSPs) established by the Department of War. Ender’s Foundry’s intent is to accelerate AI-enabled simulation capabilities to ensure the U.S. stays ahead of AI-enabled adversaries.

Review the DISCORD solicitation.

Source: SAM

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DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) is sponsoring an unclassified hybrid Proposers Day in support of an anticipated DICE solicitation. The purpose of this event is to provide information on DICE technical goals and challenges, address questions from potential proposers, and provide an opportunity for potential proposers to consider how their research may align with the DICE program objectives. Attendance is voluntary and it is not required to propose to the DICE solicitation.

The DICE Proposers Day will be held on May 29, 2026 from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM ET in-person at the Executive Conference Center, located at 4075 Wilson Blvd, Arlington, Virginia, 22203 and virtually via Zoom. No more than three representatives per organization unit, and five people per overall organization, may attend this Proposers Day. Registrants are strongly encouraged to coordinate attendance internally within their organizations prior to registration. Registration for in-person attendance must be completed no later than 5:00 PM ET on May 19, 2026.

Future conflicts will unfold at machine speed in highly dynamic and contested environments. This will require autonomous, multi-agent artificial intelligence (AI) systems to create an asymmetric battlespace advantage and reduce risk to warfighters. The DICE program seeks to develop the theory and algorithms for decentralized coordination and local inference control to enable a scalable, adaptive, and resilient collective of heterogeneous AI agents that can autonomously execute sustained long-time-horizon missions in contested environments while remaining under our control.

In contrast to small-scale, rigid, and fragile centralized orchestration or the high-risk unpredictable nature of ad hoc compositions of AI agents, DICE aims to harness the scalability and adaptability of self-organizing systems while minimizing risks and ensuring that the collective behavior remains predictable and aligned with intended outcomes. This approach mirrors the principles of decentralized self-organization that underpin the internet’s own scalability and resilience, where robust global behavior emerges from simple, local rules.

Review the DICE Proposers Day invitation.

Source: SAM

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Future conflicts will unfold at machine speed in highly dynamic and contested environments. This will require autonomous, multi-agent artificial intelligence (AI) systems to create an asymmetric battlespace advantage and reduce risk to warfighters. The DICE program seeks to develop the theory and algorithms for decentralized coordination and local inference control to enable a scalable, adaptive, and resilient collective of heterogeneous AI agents that can autonomously execute sustained long-time-horizon missions in contested environments while remaining under our control.

In contrast to small-scale, rigid, and fragile centralized orchestration or the high-risk unpredictable nature of ad hoc compositions of AI agents, DICE aims to harness the scalability and adaptability of self-organizing systems while minimizing risks and ensuring that the collective behavior remains predictable and aligned with intended outcomes. This approach mirrors the principles of decentralized self-organization that underpin the internet’s own scalability and resilience, where robust global behavior emerges from simple, local rules.

DICE aims to develop a decentralized AI architecture suitable for rapidly evolving, unpredictable, and contested environments. With this architecture, AI agents can dynamically form teams using peer-to-peer coordination to execute complex missions. This coordination will be robust to failure or compromise of individual agents, as well as to “rogue” AI agents that might develop misaligned instrumental goals. The local inference control on each AI agent will ensure role coherence of individual agents and constrain the emergent behavior of the collective to maintain alignment with commander’s intent over the long term, even across multiple inference steps.

DICE will seek to expand and leverage the theory of self-organizing systems and distributed consensus algorithms, together with recent breakthroughs in controlling the internal reasoning and inference of AI foundation models at inference-time. DICE aims to advance AI beyond individual agent capabilities by fostering system-level capability that emerges from the interactions between agents. This controlled emergence ensures DICE AI agents remain on mission, maintain doctrine, suppress misbehaviors, and remain resilient to agent loss or compromise. The program’s scope does not include the development and deployment of autonomous systems in the real world. The program will use simulation environments to demonstrate DICE architectures in Department of War-relevant use-cases, targeting measurable gains in scalability, adaptability, and resilience against both benign failures and adversarial attacks.

Review the DARPA DICE announcement.

Source: SAM

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DARPA will host a Proposers Day in support of DARPA-PS-26-27, the DISCORD program on 7 May 2026 at the SPA Arlington Research Collaboration Center (SPARCC), 4075 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, Virginia 22203 from 9:30 AM to 5:00 PM ET. The purpose of this conference is to provide information on the DISCORD program; promote additional discussion on this topic; address questions from potential proposers; and provide a forum for potential proposers to present their capabilities for teaming opportunities.

The objective of the DISCORD program is to develop an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-native1 tactics engine that can incorporate live sensor data and high-fidelity simulation to rapidly generate tactics that continuously adapt to changes in the operational environment. The goal is to provide commanders with a portfolio of diverse strategies that can pivot dynamically in response to evolving conditions. The DARPA DISCORD effort implements Ender’s Foundry, one of several warfighting Pace-Setting Projects (PSPs) established by the Department of War. Ender’s Foundry’s intent is to accelerate AI-enabled simulation capabilities to ensure we stay ahead of AI-enabled adversaries.

Review the DARPA DISCORD Proposers Day announcement.

Source: SAM

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During a demonstration in Northern California, the event-based camera tracked multiple targets, including ground vehicles, aircraft, and live fires, by capturing rapid motion not achievable with conventional frame-based infrared cameras. By reporting only changes in motion rather than full image frames, the camera was able to deliver a near-instantaneous view of activity happening during the exercise.

“This technology represents a new way of sensing the world in mid-wave infrared,” said Colin Whelan, president of advanced technology at Raytheon. “By focusing only on motion instead of recording every frame and analyzing after the fact, we gain the ability to track very fast objects with far less data and processing, enabling much quicker threat detection and response time.”

This capability opens the door to a wide range of defense and national security applications, particularly in environments where speed, clutter, and high volumes of data challenge existing sensors and processors. This includes enhanced battlefield awareness and base protection, smarter missile guidance, and more effective surveillance from aircraft and unmanned systems.

Developed under the DARPA-funded Fast Event-based Neuromorphic Camera and Electronics (FENCE) program, the camera was built from the ground up as a new sensing architecture. With the initial contract complete, Raytheon’s Advanced Technology team is now exploring follow on demonstrations and data collection that would showcase the sensor across a broader set of mission scenarios and target types.

Source: RTX

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“Maude-HCS provides users a rigorous yet practical way to validate performance-privacy guarantees of hidden communication designs before they ever touch the wire,” said Dr. Joud Khoury, principal investigator at RTX BBN Technologies. “This capability has the potential to fundamentally change how the national security community builds and validates covert communication channels.”

Hidden communication systems embed covert messages into ordinary network activity with the goal of concealing not only the content of the communication but also its very existence, so an observer sees only routine traffic. These systems are critical to both internet freedom and national security efforts, enabling journalists and U.S. armed forces, for example, to exchange information safely in high-risk or contested environments where overt communications might be monitored or blocked. Since the detection of a hidden channel can endanger lives and compromise missions, it is essential to ensure these systems remain both effective and undetectable.

How Maude-HCS solves the problem:

• Provides rigorous guarantees on performance, scalability and privacy: predicts latency, data rate and how long the system can operate without being detected, with just 1% to 9% error compared with a controlled experimental deployment — confirming that the channel meets mission requirements while remaining invisible.
• Accelerates validation: replaces weeks of trial-and-error testing with automated analysis that delivers results in hours.
• Operates on standard computing hardware: scales log-linearly with model size, including the number of messages exchanged in the network, to handle enterprise-scale traffic on a single eight-core server.
• Enables open‑source collaboration: allows universities, industry partners and government labs to reproduce results and extend the toolkit, reducing development cycles from months to days.

By delivering measurable, verifiable pre-deployment performance, Maude-HCS strengthens U.S. cyber defense, protects critical infrastructure and maintains operational advantage in contested environments.

Source: RTX

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DARPA is soliciting innovative proposals in the following technical area: cyber security performance in AI. Proposed research should investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science and economics. Specifically excluded is research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice.

Bordeaux is a thirty-six (36) month program organized into one startup period (not part of the technical program) and two program phases. The Security Startup Period is three (3) months, Phase 1 is eighteen (18) months (Base), and Phase 2 (Base Expansion) is eighteen (18) months. This PS is soliciting proposals for both 18-month phases (see classified addendum for further details).

Additionally, this PS is requesting proposers submit an estimate for a twelve (12) month Transition Phase for planning and budgeting purposes only. The Transition Phase is not being solicited by this PS and only serves as a rough estimate in case the need for a Transition Phase arises at the end of the program. Multiple awards are anticipated.

Review the DARPA Bordeaux PS.

Source: SAM

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DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is issuing a Disruption Opportunity (DO), inviting submissions of innovative basic or applied research concepts in the technical domain of high assurance artificial intelligence systems.

This DO is issued under the Program Announcement for Disruptioneering, DARPA-PA-25-07. All awards will be made in the form of an Other Transaction (OT) for Prototype project. The total award value for the combined Phase 1 base (Feasibility Study) and Phase 2 option (Proof of Concept) is limited to $2,000,000. This total award value includes Government funding and performer cost share if required or proposed.

CLARA is an exploratory, fundamental research program that aims to create high assurance, broadly applicable AI systems of systems. This will be accomplished by creating a scientific, theory-driven architectural foundation for the hierarchical composition of a wide variety of both Machine Learning (ML) and Automated Reasoning (AR), also known as Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, subsystems. CLARA seeks to create a foundation that is algorithmic, highly reusable, and computationally scalable.

For CLARA, AI systems of systems means systems that are hierarchically composed of constituent subsystems that employ ML and AR techniques and also contain both ML and AR models whose outputs are composed to create the overall system response. Assurance here means verifiability with strong explainability to humans, based on automated logical proofs and hierarchical, vetted logic building blocks.

DARPA anticipates that successful performers in this program will combine innovations such as higher order logic, probabilistic logic, logical expressivity, hierarchically structured knowledge representation, and interoperable integration of AR and ML. The range of practically important ML and AR techniques and associated model families that will be explored within this program as constituents for hierarchical composition includes, but is not limited to, Neural Networks (NN), Bayesian ML, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Generalized Additive Models (GAM), Logic Programs (LP), Classical logic, and Answer Set Programs (ASP).

Review the DARPA CLARA opportunity.

Source: SAM

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“Parsons is a leader in space domain innovation. With this contract, we will build on our established partnerships as we shift from DARPA to SDA, broadening our contributions to the Blackjack program,” said Ed Baron, senior vice president of Parsons’ Space Engineering Solutions. “This expansion allows us to leverage our expertise in spacecraft control to enhance mission planning and execution through our as-a-service ground control system. We look forward to supporting SDA’s objectives as we continue to advance space operations.”

With this additional funding, Parsons will consolidate Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) spacecraft support and deliver comprehensive Blackjack mission operations through our common ground element at the Parsons Space Operations Center. This will utilize the OrbitXChange platform and the Ground Operations Center as-a-Service commercial solution. The company will also offer an integrated suite of mission support capabilities, including advanced experimentation and extensive operational planning services. These efforts will ensure seamless connectivity between the Ground Operations Center and commercial ground station providers, enabling robust global coverage and enhancing the effectiveness of satellite operations.

Source: Parsons

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DARPA anticipates funding a limited number of proposals under this solicitation. Specifically excluded is research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice. Proposed research should investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems.

The STO at DARPA regularly publishes solicitations requesting responses to specific program topics. This announcement seeks revolutionary research ideas for topics not addressed by ongoing STO programs or other published DARPA solicitations.

To avoid proposals that duplicate existing activities or are responsive to other published STO solicitations, potential proposers are highly encouraged to review current STO programs and solicitations, respectively listed at http://www.darpa.mil/about-us/offices/sto and http://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/opportunities. Contacting STO program managers to discuss their research interests is also encouraged. A current list of program managers is available at http://www.darpa.mil/about-us/people.

DARPA’s STO is a systems warfare office that seeks innovative and disruptive technologies for existing and future battlespaces. STO programs deliver solutions at speed and scale for today’s warfighters while developing the resilient “breakthrough” systems and technologies across all physical domains (Air, Space, Sea, and Land) and across the spectrum of competition. STO does not focus on one area of responsibility or phenomenology. Instead, STO programs capture the strategic, logistical, and tactical complexity of today’s national security environments. STO seeks to create new “proof-of-concept” mission systems.

Review DARPA’s STO solicitation.

Source: SAM

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