The U.S. is quietly investing in AI agents for cyberwarfare, spending millions this year on a secretive startup that\u2019s using AI for offensive cyberattacks on American enemies. <\/p>\n
According to federal contracting records, a stealth, Arlington, Virginia-based startup called Twenty, or XX, signed a contract with the U.S. Cyber Command this summer worth up to $12.6 million. It scored a $240,000 research contract with the Navy, too. The company has received VC support from In-Q-Tel, the nonprofit venture capital organization founded by the CIA, as well as Caffeinated Capital and General Catalyst. Twenty declined to comment.<\/p>\n
Twenty\u2019s contracts are a rare case of an AI offensive cyber company with VC backing landing Cyber Command work; typically cyber contracts have gone to either small bespoke companies or to the old guard of defense contracting like Booz Allen Hamilton or L3Harris. <\/p>\n
Though the firm hasn\u2019t launched publicly yet, its website states its focus is \u201ctransforming workflows that once took weeks of manual effort into automated, continuous operations across hundreds of targets simultaneously.\u201d Twenty claims it is \u201cfundamentally reshaping how the U.S. and its allies engage in cyber conflict.\u201d<\/p>\n
Its job ads reveal more. In one, Twenty is seeking a director of offensive cyber research, who will develop \u201cadvanced offensive cyber capabilities including attack path frameworks\u2026 and AI-powered automation tools.\u201d AI engineer job ads indicate Twenty will be deploying open source tools like CrewAI, which is used to manage multiple autonomous AI agents that collaborate. And an analyst role says the company will be working on \u201cpersona development.\u201d Often, government cyberattacks use social engineering, relying on convincing fake online accounts to infiltrate enemy communities and networks. (Forbes has previously reported on police contractors who\u2019ve created such avatars with AI<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Twenty\u2019s executive team, according to its website, is stacked with former military and intelligence agents. CEO and cofounder Joe Lin is a former U.S. Navy Reserve officer who was previously VP of product management at cyber giant Palo Alto Networks. He joined Palo Alto after the firm acquired Expanse<\/a>, where he helped national security clients determine where their networks were vulnerable. CTO Leo Olson also worked on the national security team at Expanse and was a signals intelligence officer at the U.S. Army. VP of engineering Skyler Onken spent over a decade at U.S. Cyber Command and the U.S. Army. The startup\u2019s head of government relations, Adam Howard, spent years on the Hill, most recently working on the National Security Council transition team for the incoming Trump administration. <\/p>\n The U.S. government isn\u2019t the only country using AI to build out its hacking capabilities. Last week, AI giant Anthropic released some startling research<\/a>: Chinese hackers were using its tools to carry out cyberattacks. The company said hackers had deployed Claude to spin up AI agents to do 90% of the work on scouting out targets and coming up with ideas on how to hack them.<\/p>\n It\u2019s possible the U.S. could also be using OpenAI, Anthropic or Elon Musk\u2019s xAI in offensive cyber operations. The Defense Department gave each company contracts worth up to $200 million for unspecified \u201cfrontier AI\u201d projects. None have confirmed what they\u2019re working on for the DOD.<\/p>\n Given its focus on simultaneous attacks on hundreds of targets, Twenty\u2019s products appear to be a step up in terms of cyberwarfare automation. <\/p>\n By contrast, beltway contractor Two Six Technologies has received a number of contracts in the AI offensive cyber space, including one for $90 million in 2020, but its tools are mostly to assist humans rather than replace them. For the last six years, it\u2019s been working on developing automated AI \u201cto assist cyber battlespace\u201d and \u201csupport development of cyber warfare strategies\u201d under a project dubbed IKE. Reportedly<\/a> its AI was allowed to press ahead with carrying out an attack if the chances of success were high. The contract value was ramped up to $190 million by 2024, but there\u2019s no indication IKE uses agents to carry out operations at the scale that Twenty is claiming. Two Six did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n AI is much more commonly used on the defensive side, particularly in enterprises. As Forbes reported<\/a> earlier this week, an Israeli startup called Tenzai is tweaking AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic, among others, to try to find vulnerabilities in customer software, though its goal is red teaming, not hacking.<\/p>\n MORE FROM FORBESForbesThese Israeli Founders Built A $330 Million AI Hacking Startup In Just 5 MonthsBy Thomas Brewster<\/a>ForbesGovernment Shutdown Leaves U.S. Cyber Defenses Weaker, Insiders SayBy Thomas Brewster<\/a>ForbesAnthropic And OpenAI Pay This $450 Million Startup To Test AI\u2019s Capacity For EvilBy Thomas Brewster<\/a>ForbesHow This Israeli Hacker Bootstrapped Her AI Cyber Company To ProfitabilityBy Thomas Brewster<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The U.S. is quietly investing in AI agents for cyberwarfare, spending millions this year on a secretive startup…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294581,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,184,181,507,7257,4002,1283,5472,74,153972,153973,4119],"class_list":{"0":"post-294580","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-anthropic","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-cybersecurity","13":"tag-hacking","14":"tag-openai","15":"tag-pentagon","16":"tag-technology","17":"tag-twenty","18":"tag-two-six-technologies","19":"tag-xai"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294580\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}