Program Announcement: Anticipatory and Adaptive Anti-Money Laundering (A3ML)

Background
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is initiating the Anticipatory and Adaptive Anti-Money Laundering (A3ML) program through its Information Innovation Office (I2O). The program aims to address the significant challenges posed by money laundering, which directly impacts American citizens and global interests. Notably, a substantial portion of North Korea's nuclear program is financed through laundered funds, and money launderers linked to Chinese underground banking are reportedly providing financial services to Mexico's Sinaloa cartel.

Current anti-money laundering efforts are hindered by manual analysis methods that struggle to keep pace with evolving schemes. DARPA seeks to revolutionize these practices by implementing agile, algorithmic approaches.

Work Details
The A3ML program aims to develop advanced algorithms capable of analyzing financial transaction graphs to identify suspicious patterns. Key objectives include:
1) Creating algorithms that can learn new patterns to anticipate future illicit activities;
2) Developing techniques for representing patterns of illicit financial behavior in a concise, machine-readable format that remains comprehensible to human analysts;
3) Ensuring the algorithms can accurately depict how bad actors move money globally without compromising sensitive data.

Period of Performance
The specific period of performance for the A3ML program has not been detailed in this notice.

Place of Performance
The geographic location(s) for the performance of this contract have not been specified.