The AIxCC Semi Final Competition was designed to test a hypothesis that the latest AI and LLM technology could advance
cybersecurity at scale.
The competition was launched in August 2023 and more than 90 teams registered to compete. These teams aimed to develop
Cyber Reasoning Systems capable of automatically processing a set of Challenge Projects – which were designed by AIxCC
subject matter experts – with the goal of automatically finding and fixing Challenge Project vulnerabilities. Teams were able to
review and test their technology with a set of Exemplar Challenges released by the organizers in the spring of 2024. From
there, nearly 40 teams successfully developed and submitted Cyber Reasoning Systems to compete in the Semi Final
competition.
During the competition, these Cyber Reasoning Systems navigated an identical corpus of Challenge Projects that had a basis in
a real-world, open-source project that is critical to industry, national security, and the public: Jenkins, Linux kernel, Nginx,
SQLite3, and Apache Tika. The Challenge Projects contained synthetic vulnerabilities for teams’ systems to identify and
attempt to patch. Competitors’ systems were scored according to a public algorithm, and the AIxCC organizers verified results.
In total, competitors’ systems discovered 22 unique synthetic vulnerabilities in the Challenge Projects, and of those, patched
15. Competitors’ systems identified 11 unique patches for C-based challenges and four unique patches for Java-based
challenges. Competitors’ systems also found one real-world bug in SQLite3, which has been responsibly disclosed according to
SQLite3’s bug reporting guidelines.
highlighted the teams and their
achievements as well as the overall
progress of the competition.
translated the competition’s
Challenge Projects into fictional
scenarios to bring to life the
real-world stakes of the
competition. These fictional stories
conceptually represented the game
but were not directly tied to
real-time game results.
included a wide range of content to
explore and learn from. This layer extended
throughout the city and also into
the Stacks where attendees could
interact with our four Collaborator
companies, Anthropic, Google,
Microsoft and OpenAI and with
representatives and leaders from
DARPA and ARPA-H. They could
also go deep into the technical
aspects of the competition with
some of the Challenge authors and
other experts in the City Defense
Headquarters.
City Walkthrough
Water Narrative
Medical Narrative