Future Program: Decentralized Artificial Intelligence through Controlled Emergence (DICE)

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency issued a Special Notice on April 21, 2026, announcing the forthcoming Decentralized Artificial Intelligence through Controlled Emergence (DICE) program, with a response deadline of May 29, 2026. This is an informational notice only; DARPA will not accept submissions against it, and no obligation exists to issue a formal solicitation. If released, the formal solicitation will be posted on SAM.gov.

The DICE program seeks to develop theory and algorithms for decentralized coordination and local inference control enabling scalable, adaptive, and resilient collectives of heterogeneous AI agents that can autonomously execute sustained long-time-horizon missions in contested environments while remaining under human control. The program aims to harness self-organizing systems and distributed consensus algorithms while minimizing unpredictability and ensuring collective behavior remains aligned with intended outcomes. Key objectives include enabling AI agents to dynamically form peer-to-peer coordinated teams, ensure robustness against individual agent failure or compromise and rogue agents with misaligned goals, and maintain alignment with commander's intent across multiple inference steps. Program scope is limited to simulation environments demonstrating architectures in Department of War-relevant use cases and explicitly excludes real-world development and deployment of autonomous systems. Susmit Jha serves as Program Manager. The notice falls under NAICS 541715 (Research and Development in Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences) and PSC AC11 (National Defense R&D Services—Basic Research).