In 2021, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a military research agency under the Pentagon , sought proposals for “real-time, comprehensive tools that establish ground truth for how countries are conducting domestic information control.”
DARPA’s goal in developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology ostensibly was to help the United States government better understand “how digitally authoritarian regimes repress their populations at scale over the internet via censorship, blocking, or throttling.”