IARPA Releases Five New Innovation Programs to Enhance National Security Capabilities
April 29, 2026
In alignment with President Trump and DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s ODNI 2.0 vision to accelerate the delivery of technical capabilities to the Intelligence Community (IC), IARPA today released five new research efforts using the Emerging Technology Accelerator (ETA) framework to bring mission-critical innovation to fill IC gaps. The announcement can be found here
These five AI-focused programs were initially introduced in January at an IARPA-hosted Proposers’ Day (Hear PDDNI remarks) attended by ODNI Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence (PDDNI) Aaron Lukas.
“These research programs will help build capabilities that are directly applicable to mission needs by bridging the technical gap between emerging solutions and successful application,” said PDDNI Lukas. “By working together, we can achieve great things and ensure our nation remains secure and prosperous in the face of emerging threats.”
“We want IARPA to be the front door for the IC’s emerging technology requirements to ensure we can harness private-sector expertise and accelerate breakthroughs in mission-critical technologies,” explained IARPA Director Russell Miller.
The five research programs – ARCADE, COSMIC, DECIPHER, LOCUS, and MOVES– bring a specific focus on emerging areas of technology that are vital to the intelligence mission [better torture technology]. Ultimately these programs seek to enhance intelligence capabilities by extracting actionable insights from a variety of complex sources such as geospatial imagery, circuit design, linguistic trends, and open-source videos.
The release of these programs represents an opportunity for the Government to engage directly with industry to accelerate the delivery of needed technological solutions.
ARCADE:
ARCADE (Artificial Reasoning for Circuit Automation and Design Engineering) aims to transform and accelerate electrical circuit design by leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to develop a comprehensive AI-knowledge assistant, extracting key information from vast technical documentation to enable engineers to perform quick, intuitive queries to meet the speed of mission.
COSMIC:
The aim of the COSMIC program is to formulate a methodology to leverage commercial remote sensing technologies and open-source geolocation information to generate pseudo-persistent data (PPD). This will be done by combining and translating complex and novel data, such as non-nadir imagery and non-Red, Green, Blue (RGB) spectral bands, using artificial intelligence and computer vision-based methodologies into a layered, temporal geospatial model understandable by commercial agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems. COSMIC will enable the development of an agentic AI analytic system trained by commercial vendors and equipped to answer intelligence questions.
DECIPHER:
The Decipher program’s goal is to create capabilities to detect specialized language of interest to a user and generate probable definitions for unfamiliar, coded and novel terms. Decipher will infer potential meanings from (often limited) contextual information and provide translation and annotation of specialized terms, including jargon, slang, and acronyms, in texts and speech. The program will also develop technology to annotate text with relevant social and contextual fact, capturing nuanced meaning, as well as to detect concept drift by monitoring use of terminology as it evolves over time.
LOCUS:
The LocUS program aims to create technology that automatically and accurately geolocates multimedia content by maximally leveraging audio and visual information. Performers on the LocUS program will develop capabilities for indoor and outdoor terrestrial geolocation of previously unseen video clips. Solution performance will be evaluated over a variety of search areas, ranging from neighborhoods to continents.
MOVES:
With the increasing adoption of virtual/telemedicine, the MOVES program aims to develop algorithms that can augment virtual diagnoses of a small set of neurological movement disorders from video of subjects taken in non-clinical and uncontrolled settings. The algorithms will not be designed to replace medical professionals. They will augment the medical professional’s ability to provide care in non-clinical and less than ideal settings.
https://www.iarpa.gov/newsroom/article/iarpa-releases-five-new-innovation-programs-to-enhance-national-security-capabilities
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