US Army picks a bid for ECHOTRIBBLE, its plan for autonomous AI agents

Army Cyber Command has picked one company’s bid for ECHOTRIBBLE, a programme for AI agents that hunt down targets in computer networks. The command’s technology centre and the Cyber Fusion Innovation Center (CFIC) made the choice on 8 October, according to CFIC’s website. A statement of work and contract will follow, it says. CFIC does not name the company.

The Intercept reported details of the programme on Monday, from documents it obtained. TNW has not seen those documents.

CFIC runs the effort with the technology centre, known as ArCTIC. Army Cyber Command, or ARCYBER, leads the Army’s defensive and offensive cyber operations.

The two held an in-person event in Augusta, Georgia, on 24 June. The tool would move through infrastructure on its own, “identifying and neutralizing identified threats/targets”, says the event summary. CFIC’s event page adds that the tool “must operate with minimal human oversight” and work in “contested, air-gapped, or cloud-native systems”.

The summary lists 43 attendees from 29 organisations. They included Dakota State University, Amazon Web Services, the Army’s C5ISR centre and the US Air Force’s 305th Cyberspace Operations Squadron.

The slides shown at the June event are also public on CFIC’s site. In one example, the software lands on a laptop, finds other devices on the same network and makes copies of itself for an iPad, an Apple desktop and a Windows 11 PC. The slides plan prototype delivery around 23 November, about six months after work starts.

Companies then submitted 65 white papers. Five presented to an assessment team at a virtual event from 6 to 8 October. The team picked one. All companies were told of their status on 13 October, CFIC says.

A question-and-answer document for vendors says offensive missions are the programme’s main focus, The Intercept’s Sam Biddle reported. Neutralising a target could mean “disabling the threat completely or temporarily, deleting the threat from the target”, it says.

The agents would move from device to device inside a foreign network until they found their target. They would report back as little as possible and then delete themselves, ideally before anyone noticed. The Army could set “predefined triggers” for what and where to attack.

The plan follows months of reports about AI agents breaking into systems they were not told to attack. OpenAI’s agents hit RubyGems and Hugging Face during testing. Another broke into Australia’s Medicare portal. Last week, Anthropic said small AI models may soon copy themselves onto devices.

David Krueger is a machine learning professor at the University of Montreal. He told The Intercept that giving autonomous systems a mandate to neutralise threats is “incredibly dangerous”.

Hyrum Anderson, chief executive of the AI security firm Abundant, said an agent could pass through civilian systems on the way. He gave the example of a US water utility, if an adversary had set up its command servers there.

“The target may well be hit. But what path will it take?” Anderson told The Intercept.

William Marcellino is a senior behavioural scientist at the RAND Corporation. He said today’s public AI lacks the world knowledge that stops a soldier doing something they should not.

ARCYBER did not respond to The Intercept’s questions, including how it would stop ECHOTRIBBLE causing unintended damage.

The command’s head spoke about its AI agents on the same day, at the Association of the US Army’s conference in Washington. Federal News Network’s report of Lt. Gen. Christopher Eubank’s remarks does not mention ECHOTRIBBLE. He described Task Force Lexington, which has built a team of AI agents for defensive cyber work.

Eubank said “no agents have strayed to this point” because of strict guardrails.

“We are treating each one of these agents just like a human operator, so they are basic. And with that mindset, they are only allowed to do so much. It is a really tight framework,” Eubank said.

Humans check the agents’ work every day, he said. The Pentagon set up an Autonomous Warfare Command this month.

I am the Editor in Chief for TNW, covering technology not as a parade of launches and valuations, but as a system of influence, persuasion, (show all) I am the Editor in Chief for TNW, covering technology not as a parade of launches and valuations, but as a system of influence, persuasion, and change. I write about startups, venture capital, digital policy, and Europe ecosystem, with an eye on the larger story beneath them: who gets to build the future, who profits from it, and how Europe is learning to speak in a louder voice of its own. Before moving into senior editorial leadership, I've built my career for over +10 years across journalism, storytelling, content strategy, SEO, and digital publishing, with experience in SaaS, hospitality, art, and culture.

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