The Pentagon's research arm is seeking new artificial intelligence tools that can uncover hidden flaws in the rules governing US financial and other digital markets and fix them before adversaries can exploit them to cause economic chaos.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's new Intrinsic Market Resilience program is aimed at protecting electronic markets tied to everything from stocks and bonds to energy and cloud-computing resources.
Those critical systems have become faster and more efficient, DARPA says, but their increasingly interconnected nature has also created new avenues for disruption.
"I think that the incredible advances in automated reasoning and in AI are opening new ways to defend things," Matthew Wilding, the IMR program manager at DARPA, told Business Insider. "They can be used to attack things as well, but the focus of this program is using them to defend things, to find those counterexamples and find those improvements we can make to these designs."
"The program is taking these two technologies that have really advanced in the last few years and applying them to these electronic markets," Wilding said, "so that they are more resilient and more dependa...