Agency AI (Agen.cy) in National Security Hackathon by the CIA

3 min readAug 27, 2024

Presented by Agency AI (Agen.cy and AgentOps)

300+ veterans, military contractors, and engineers just spent 48 hours hacking AI defense tech

Someone built a laser cannon and the CIA showed up.

Here’s what we saw at the @cerebral_valley National Security Hackathon by @CIA x @ShieldCapVC x @anduriltechx x Founders Fund (🧵):

1/ AI Laser Sentinel

Edge-deployed AI laser designed to neutralize enemy drones
Drone defense powered by OSS AI and a Raspberry Pi
🥇1st place ($3,000 and a Starlink)
@lazerdabs, @geletavc, @LaFrogman and @HerefortheTech3
Twitter source

2/ Overwatch

AI image segmentation and search over military UAV and drone footage
Smart search to parse through thousands of hours of video logs to find enemy combatants, equipment, and risks
🥈2nd place ($2,000)
@BrianMikeWu, @justinlinw, @ianmkim, and @pavan_agrawal_1
Twitter source

3/ Lima Charlie

White box adversarial attack that jailbreaks speech recognition models to detect AI agents speaking with deep fake voice models
Anti-agent defense using Whisper-Attack
@daniel_spokoyny, @sumanthvrao, and @NikolaiVogler
Twitter source

4/ Sage

Light-based encrypted communication protocol for drone swarms.
Mother drones equipped with this laser can safely orchestrate and command child drones
Julian Sakowski, @antonplagutin, and @investcapitalai
Twitter source

5/ Panopsis

Multi-modal AI (satellite+telegram+news) search for civilian data, military comms, and OSINT. Source data is visualized into knowledge graphs and formatted as SPOTREP
Chat with your SPOTREP
Artur Kiulian, Philippe Brulé, @mabach_sb
🥉3rd place ($1,000)
Twitter source

6/ Mini-MANPAD (man-portable air-defense system)

Portable anti-drone defense missile powered by open-source AI
Computer vision model (Detectron2go) trained from scratch and deployed in a raspberry pi 3
Twitter source

7/ Tail Watch

MAC address detector that identifies all devices in your vicinity and tracks if you’re being followed
AirTags, but for everything (and finding if someone’s on your tail)
Twitter source

8/ SkyWatch

GPS-Free location tracking
CLIP model trained to track locations and predict coordinates in GPS-denied environments by using drone aerial images
Twitter source