Army Launches Project Griffin to Deploy AI Cybersecurity Agents for Autonomous Network Defense at Machine Speed

The Army Contracting Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground issued a Call for Solutions on behalf of Program Executive Office Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors for Project Griffin, seeking agentic AI to build the Intelligent Response and Orchestration Node, or IRON, with solution briefs due August 27 12. Principal Cyber Advisor Brandon Pugh told the TechNet Augusta conference on August 19 that Griffin is one of three lines of effort under the Army Rapid Development of Cyber Defense Systems program, alongside Panoptic Junction and a "purple teams" vendor-assessment effort, modeling the approach on the Army's earlier Project ARIA ground-warfare AI initiative 3. IRON is meant to ingest sensor feeds and automatically execute defensive actions across seven categories, from firewall blocks to vulnerability patching, through existing tools like Tychon and Microsoft Defender, operating under a zero-trust model that assumes the network is already compromised, while maintaining an automated audit trail, a manually adjustable confidence threshold, a "master kill switch," and an undo function 4. Product manager Wayne Sok said the Army wants systems that limit token costs and avoid expanding the attack surface, citing the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident as a "reality check" 4. The Army may limit pitches to seven companies in the solicitation's second of three phases 4.