Army Wants AI Cyberweapons That Spread, Strike, Then Vanish
By Daniel Rao Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett receives her third star at U.S. Army Cyber Command headquarters in Fort Gordon, Georgia, in May 2022. The command is now developing an AI-agent framework codenamed ECHOTRIBBLE. File photo: Joseph McClammy / U.S. Army / Wikimedia Commons — public domain (US government work). The Pentagon has spent twenty years warning the world about self-spreading malware. Now the U.S. Army wants to build its own — one that thinks. Documents obtained by The Intercept describe ECHOTRIBBLE, a U.S. Army Cyber Command program that would turn AI agents into offensive cyberweapons: software that slips into an adversary's network, copies itself from device to device until it reaches its target, and then deletes itself before anyone realises it was ever there. That is not a metaphor from a breathless op-ed. It is the Army's own design, described in documents the service circulated to potential contractors and reported by Sam Biddle at The Intercept on Oct...