Intrinsic Market Resilience (IMR)
DARPA seeks proposals to develop LLM-assisted formal modeling and analysis methods that can identify weaknesses in market designs and generate/resolution-check repairs to improve resilience against disruptive attacks.
⚑ federal contract solicitation; applicant restrictions not fully specified in the notice excerpt · DARPA program focused on formal methods/LLM automation for market design resilience, not market operations or regulation
This is a DARPA program in formal market modeling, LLM automation, and computational resilience of trading systems—squarely a computer science/economic engineering effort rather than this team’s social-behavioral risk, public opinion, warning, or education-policy lines. IPPRA might relate only tangentially through public risk or security framing, but none of the roster’s PI programs align with developing market-design repair methods or machine-analyzable formal market proofs.
JUDGED AGAINST THE ROSTER'S PUBLICATION DOSSIER · GPT-5.4-MINI · 2026-10-07
Unit fits — one characterization, each unit's own rules
| Physical Sciences & Engineering (demo) | 90 strong | technical depth: central; funds applied research |
| IPPRA | 58 good | peripheral portfolio topic: national_security_defense; signature methods: policy analysis; social/behavioral work is minor; funds applied research |
| Tom Love Innovation Hub | 45 partial | funds applied research; prototyping/demonstration stage; deep-tech content |
Description
The evolution of markets from physical trading floors to interconnected, electronic venues has introduced new speed, transparency, and efficiency, but has also created new attack surfaces and systemic risks. Modern markets, which host trading for everything from equities and bonds to energy and cloud computing resources, can be manipulated in ways unanticipated by their designers. The 2010 United States Equity market "flash crash" and the 2000-2001 California energy crisis demonstrated how weaknesses in a market's public interfaces could have dramatic consequences. Similar design issues in today's complex, interacting market systems could be used to cause economic damage, which the IMR program technology seeks to prevent. The IMR program aims to develop repair methods to protect essential economic sectors against devastating attacks that exploit the public interfaces of modern markets. Current legal and regulatory protections focus on deterring profit-seeking manipulation and ensuring compliance, but they do not sufficiently protect markets from adversaries aiming simply to cause disruption. The IMR program seeks to address this gap by developing the tools to automatically model market designs, identify hidden weaknesses, and recommend and analyze repairs on the market models to make markets fundamentally more resilient to attack. IMR aims to combine Large Language Model (LLM)-based automation with rigorous modeling and analysis to identify remediations for market weaknesses. The program will develop formal notations to precisely describe how markets operate and coordinate, creating machine-analyzable models from informal descriptions like regulatory filings and technical specifications. Against these models, IMR will formulate and assess "resilience conjectures” - mathematical statements about desirable market properties, such as the inability for actors to manipulate prices without risking loss. By automatically analyzing these conjectures, the program aims to prove that a market design is resilient in specific ways or, if it is not, to generate a counterexample that illustrates a concrete weakness. These counterexamples will then be used to refine the conjectures and, ultimately, to recommend and confirm specific repairs to the market's design. This approach is intended to provide a capability to protect U.S. markets against adversaries who wish to cause chaos, ensuring the stability of both civilian and military critical resources that rely on modern market mechanisms.
Eligibility
Applicant restrictions (federal contract). Set-aside: . Notice type: Solicitation. Organization: DEPT OF DEFENSE / DEFENSE ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY (DARPA) / DEF ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS AGCY.
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