As threat actors continue to exploit software vulnerabilities with increasingly sophisticated attacks, the urgency around automated and scalable vulnerability discovery and remediation has also escalated. To address this pressing need, the Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) incentivizes the best and brightest engineers and program analysts to develop real-world solutions to these cybersecurity threats.

Competition. Leading up to the ASC, competitors aimed to develop Cyber Reasoning Systems (CRSs)–tools designed to automatically find and fix vulnerabilities at scale using Large Language Models. AIxCC received nearly 40 CRS submissions and tested each against an identical corpus of Challenge Projects that had a basis in a real-world, open-source project: Jenkins, Linux kernel, Nginx, SQLite3, and Apache Tika.

Experience. In parallel, the AIxCC organizers constructed a futuristic, fictional city that brought the AIxCC Semifinal Competition to life—the City of Northbridge. The City of Northbridge made its debut at the AIxCC Village at DEF CON 32, in Las Vegas, Nevada. DEF CON attendees, ranging from software developers to policymakers, boarded the train to Northbridge as their host, Kiti, called upon the Cyber Collective to remain vigilant amidst cyberattacks. For three days, Kiti guided attendees through simulated cyber-attacks on Northbridge’s critical infrastructure, enlisting help from participants in manual data collection as cybercriminal “the Rat” targeted hospitals and water systems. Attendees engaged with representatives from the team of AIxCC organizers and collaborators, while Kiti revealed the vulnerability discovery and patching capabilities of the Semifinal teams’ CRSs. The urgency and relevance of competitor CRSs became clearer as these systems defended the city’s infrastructure against a dynamic threat landscape.