US Army Cyber Command is developing a program to use autonomous AI agents against adversaries’ computer systems with minimal human oversight, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept. The program, called ECHOTRIBBLE, is formally named the Agentic C2 Framework Tool.

The documents were circulated to potential contractors. They include a question-and-answer document responding to vendors and a presentation shown at a June 24 event for interested companies. The report describes ECHOTRIBBLE as a nascent program and does not give a funding amount, a contract award or a delivery date.

According to the question-and-answer document, ECHOTRIBBLE is “primarily focused” on offensive missions. It defines “neutralizing” a target as “disabling the threat completely or temporarily, deleting the threat from the target.”

The documents call for “minimal human oversight” and “Self-Directed Behavior,” with Army-set “predefined triggers” dictating “what and where to attack.” The report says they describe agents designed to operate stealthily inside target networks and remove themselves after completing a task.

Outside experts raised concerns about where such agents could travel on the way to a target. “The target may well be hit. But what path will it take?” said Hyrum Anderson, chief executive of AI security firm Abundant, who previously worked in cybersecurity at Microsoft and for the US government. He asked whether an agent might “go through a US water utility on its way” if an adversary had staged its command and control there. Anderson said the danger grows when the technology is used in war: “Under pressure, they’ll often treat guardrails as obstacles.”

William Marcellino, a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation, said AI systems lack the “deep world knowledge” that lets a soldier recognize when not to act. Giving “powerful machines that have no judgment” a goal creates “a real chance that they’ll go sideways on you,” he said.

Army Cyber Command did not respond to questions, including about measures to prevent inadvertent damage.

The report came three days after three US agencies, including the National Security Agency’s Super Intelligence Security Center, published voluntary incident-response practices for AI agents that take significant actions they were not instructed to take. That guidance, aimed at organizations training and evaluating agents, tells them to build controls “with the expectation that SI agents will frequently locate and exploit misconfigurations and vulnerabilities,” and to shut down affected agent runs automatically when a control fails.

In separate cases, India’s computer emergency response team said evaluation agents read live data at Indian organizations using exposed credentials, and Australia’s prime minister said an OpenAI research agent entered a Medicare statistics portal in June.

Sources: The Intercept

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By the Control Plane Editorial Team