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DARPA’s Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) is over: announced in August 2023, the two-year contest concluded at DEF CON 33 in August 2025. It asked teams to build software that could find vulnerabilities in open-source code and produce repairs. In the final, the official competition site reports that systems found 54 of 63 synthetic vulnerabilities and patched 68%—results from a controlled contest, not a guarantee of performance on production software.
What was DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge?
AIxCC was a DARPA competition to develop cyber reasoning systems (CRSs): software designed to analyze code, identify security vulnerabilities, and propose or implement fixes. The goal was to help scale vulnerability discovery and remediation in open-source software, including software relevant to critical infrastructure.
DARPA announced the challenge at Black Hat USA on August 9, 2023, as a two-year contest with events at DEF CON in 2024 and 2025. The competition brought together academic and industry participants. For example, Team Atlanta included researchers from Georgia Tech, Samsung Research, KAIST, and POSTECH; Trail of Bits named its system Buttercup. DARPA’s 2023 program overview described a cumulative prize pool of $29.5 million, not all of it allocated to the final.
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How did the competition evaluate the systems?
A system did not score simply for flagging a possible bug. DARPA’s scoring approach considered discovery, accuracy, diversity, and repair quality. A useful repair needed to fix the vulnerability while preserving intended behavior; DARPA also valued patches considered plausible for acceptance in real-world development.
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The stated evaluation axes included the vulnerability classes and programming languages a system could handle, the accuracy of its reports and patches, the number of vulnerabilities correctly found, and whether its repairs were usable without breaking intended functionality. This makes the contest a test of both finding flaws and producing workable fixes.
What happened in the 2024 semifinal?
The semifinal concluded at DEF CON 32 on August 11, 2024. DARPA said nearly 40 systems were assessed against identical challenge projects based on Jenkins, the Linux kernel, Nginx, SQLite3, and Apache Tika. The projects contained synthetic vulnerabilities; they were not a representative sample of every flaw found in those projects in ordinary use.
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- DARPA reported 22 unique synthetic vulnerabilities found and 15 patched.
- It also reported one real-world bug found in SQLite3 and said it was responsibly disclosed.
- DARPA reported more than 12,500 visits to its immersive experience at DEF CON 32; that attendance figure is not a performance measure.
Who were the finalists, and who won?
DARPA named seven teams for the 2025 final: 42-b3yond-6ug, All You Need IS A Fuzzing Brain, Lacrosse, Shellphish, Team Atlanta, Theori, and Trail of Bits. At DEF CON 33 in August 2025, the top three were:
| Place | Team | Final prize |
|---|---|---|
| First | Team Atlanta | $4 million |
| Second | Trail of Bits | $3 million |
| Third | Theori | $1.5 million |
The final prize amounts were announced by DARPA and the AIxCC competition site. Before the final, DARPA said the finalists’ systems would be released as open source after the competition.
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What did the final results show—and what do they not show?
The AIxCC site reports 63 synthetic vulnerabilities in the final challenge. It says systems found 54, or 86%, and patched 68%. The site corrected an earlier total of 70 to 63; 63 is the current reported denominator.
Those figures describe performance on the contest’s challenge projects under its scoring rules. They do not establish that the same systems would find or safely fix an equivalent share of vulnerabilities in arbitrary production code. Organizations would still need to assess proposed changes, integrate tools into their workflows, and verify fixes in their own environments. The available official results are not an independent production-deployment study or a broad comparison against other security tools.
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What happens to the AIxCC systems?
DARPA and the official AIxCC site describe follow-on work to release and transition the resulting systems. The site says the open-source systems and competition materials may provide a basis for teams and companies to build tools or products. That is a path toward further use, not evidence that every system is already ready for unsupervised deployment.
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Key dates
- August 9, 2023: DARPA announced AIxCC at Black Hat USA.
- December 14, 2023: DARPA updated the schedule and published its scoring approach.
- August 11, 2024: The semifinal concluded at DEF CON 32, with seven teams advancing.
- July 8, 2025: DARPA previewed the DEF CON 33 final and named the finalists.
- August 2025: The final concluded, with Team Atlanta in first place.
Sources
- DARPA’s August 9, 2023 AIxCC announcement
- DARPA’s December 14, 2023 schedule and scoring update
- DARPA’s 2024 semifinal results
- DARPA’s 2025 final preview
- DARPA’s final-results announcement
- Official AIxCC competition site
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