DARPA looking into partners for Artificial Intelligence Reinforcements autonomy program

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is seeking information from businesses to develop tactical autonomy for its Artificial Intelligence Reinforcements program, according to a broad agency announcement.

AIR would be a dominant tactical autonomy for multiship, beyond-visual-range air combat missions, according to the listing, using AI that is compatible with existing hardware. Autonomy technology would be demonstrated on human-in-the-loop F-16 testbeds before transferring to uncrewed aircraft.

Creating a development process and testing assets to rapidly mature and continuously evolve the AI capabilities will also be important to the program, according to the notice.

DARPA expects to award multiple contracts for AIR’s four-year effort, according to the post. Six contracts would be awarded for Phase I at $30 million, and up to four contracts would be awarded for Phase II at $40 million.

Phase I would be a base period with the Phase II option covering the design, development and test of the AIR System, the post states. There are two technical areas for businesses to work on: Model Development and Multi-Agent AI Agent Training. Businesses can apply to both or either.