Proposers Day registration open for researchers interested in proposing to DARPA effort to transform anti-money laundering analytics: DARPA wants to eliminate global money laundering by replacing the current manual, reactive, and expensive analytic practices with agile, algorithmic methods.
Money laundering directly harms American citizens and global interests. Today, U.S. adversaries launder billions of U.S. dollars yearly. Half of North Korea’s nuclear program is backed by laundered funds, according to statements by the White House1, while a federal indictment alleges that money launderers tied to Chinese underground banking are a primary source of financial services for Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel2.
Despite recent anti-money laundering efforts, the United States still faces challenges in countering money laundering effectively for several reasons. According to congressional research, money laundering schemes often evade detection and disruption, as anti-money laundering (AML) efforts today rely on manual analysis of large amounts of data and are limited by finite resources and human cognitive processing speed3.
To address these challenges, DARPA is seeking research proposals for its Anticipatory and Adaptive Anti-Money Laundering (A3ML) program.
“Money laundering finances our adversaries’ weapons programs, global terrorism, and the illicit drug trade, all of which threaten U.S. national security,” said Dr. David Rushing Dewhurst, A3ML program manager, “The way we address these threats today is largely through manual data collection and analysis methods that threaten privacy. We are looking for new technological ideas that preserve privacy while setting a course to end to our adversaries’ financial warfare.” A3ML aims to develop rapid graph-search algorithms to sift through financial transactions graphs for suspicious patterns and learn new patterns to anticipate future activities. Dewhurst says the program’s success hinges on algorithms’ ability to learn a precise representation of how bad actors move money around the world without sharing sensitive data.
“The demand for enhanced information sharing between law enforcement and financial institutions’ anti-money laundering organizations is significant,” explained Dewhurst. “However, developing technology that enables this exchange while safeguarding Americans’ privacy remains a challenge. DARPA’s unique convening power will harness the nation’s best minds to shift anti-money laundering analysis from a largely manual process to one that rapidly provides human analysts with the data and analysis they need at their fingertips, all while increasing financial privacy.”
To accomplish A3ML goals, performers will develop techniques to represent patterns of illicit financial behavior in a concise, machine-readable format that’s also easily understood by human analysts. Resulting algorithms would be able to search financial databases for matches to those patterns of behavior, alerting to the likely presence of money laundering without directly sharing sensitive financial data.
DARPA will sponsor Proposers Day on Feb. 20, 2025 in Arlington, VA. Participants must register by Feb. 10. Details and registration instructions are available at https://sam.gov/opp/22562059531b4979814b8b9fcd03e3ec/view.
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[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/10/politics/north-korean-missile-program-cyberattacks/index.html. Stolen cryptocurrency must be laundered into fiat currency to purchase goods required for a defense weapons program, such as North Korea’s nuclear program.
[3] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11064
Source – U.S. DARPA