The mission of the hackathon: to write a program that can scan millions of lines of open-source code, identify security flaws and fix them, all without human intervention. Success would mean winning millions of dollars in a two-year contest sponsored by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The contest is one of the clearest signs to date that the government sees flaws in open-source software as one of the country’s biggest security risks, and considers artificial intelligence vital to addressing it....

Free open-source programs, such as the Linux operating system, help run everything from websites to power stations. The code isn’t inherently worse than what’s in proprietary programs from companies like Microsoft and Oracle, but there aren’t enough skilled engineers tasked with testing it...

Shellphish is one of seven teams that wrote papers outlining their approach well enough to get $1 million in funding for the steps that will climax at the semifinals in August at Def Con, which attracted 40 entries. The winner will get another $2 million in 2025.
Some of Shellphish’s first million dollars went for the Airbnb-listed home in Brea, which housed hackers for three weeks in June and another two in July. More went for a huge testing environment that used 5,000 central processing unit cores.
Shellphish is no random group of hackers. Though strongly associated with two public universities with changing populations, the team has been around for 20 years, and its founders are still involved.

“AI will be able to solve things that take humans months,” ...
Under the terms of the DARPA contest, all finalists must release their programs as open source, so that software vendors and consumers will be able to run them...

AI won’t be able to make all software safe, he said. But it will give the humans more time to try.
After a final, near-sleepless night of debugging and panicked last-minute fixes, Shellphish submitted its program at the 9 a.m. deadline... at the August Def Con 32 in Las Vegas, they will find out if they’re finalists. Win or lose, their AI-aided code will be available for others to build on, improving security for everyone.