DARPA "SABER" — Securing the Robustness of Battlefield AI (awarded to Lockheed Martin) — a federal contract (USAspending)

DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is the unit within the U.S. Department of Defense that focuses on advanced technology research relevant to future national security. It is known for pursuing high-risk, high-reward themes that may take time to mature but could substantially reshape how society and the military operate. The program name in this contract, "SABER," expresses the aim of securing the robustness of AI used on the battlefield. Robustness here means the strength to keep an AI performing even under unexpected inputs and noise, or under disruption and adversarial attacks — inputs deliberately crafted to make the AI misjudge.

This theme matters because placing AI in the harsh and unpredictable environment of a battlefield can surface weaknesses that did not appear in peacetime testing. AI can be brittle when situations fall outside the patterns it learned, and in a military setting one must assume that an adversary will actively try to exploit those weaknesses. If an AI responsible for judgments malfunctions under attack or disruption, the consequences can be serious. That is the backdrop to the program's premise: alongside building AI that works, it is essential to build AI that withstands attack and disruption.

This contract carries cross-cutting significance as one example of how the widely debated theme of AI safety and reliability is being made concrete in the most demanding domain of all — defense. The question of how to secure resistance to adversarial attacks is shared by civilian AI applications such as autonomous driving, finance, and the control of critical infrastructure, so progress in robustness research within defense can connect to the broader discussion of ensuring AI reliability.