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The revelation that the Pentagon quietly handed a stealth startup called Twenty a contract worth up to $12.6 million this past summer — with an additional small research award from the Navy — should make every American sit up and pay attention. This is not small-scale tinkering; federal records show a direct line from U.S. Cyber Command to a company promising to automate offensive cyber operations at scale.
Even more troubling is who’s bankrolling and staffing this outfit. Twenty counts In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm, and well-connected Silicon Valley investors among its backers, while its executive roster reads like a who’s who of former military and intelligence officials — the very revolving-door network that so often shields government projects from public scrutiny.
What makes Twenty distinct — and alarming — is its stated goal to transform weeks of manual hacking work into automated, continuous operations that can hit hundreds of targets simultaneously, according to the company’s own materials and job postings. Those listings even reference deploying open-source orchestration tools like CrewAI and building AI “personas,” a euphemism for the fake online profiles used to manipulate target populations.
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. Major AI firms and foreign adversaries are already exploiting agent-based tools to scout and attack targets, underscoring that the U.S. is racing into a new era of cyberwar where offense and defense blur together. Government contracts with big AI labs and worrying reports about foreign use of similar techniques show this is a real and accelerating threat environment, not a hypothetical exercise.
We should also note that other defense contractors have pursued AI for offensive cyber work, but historically those systems have been designed to assist humans rather than replace them. The leap Twenty promises — autonomous agents running sprawling campaigns across countless targets without traditional human oversight — is a dangerous escalation in both scale and risk.
Patriots must ask the hard questions: who authorized this level of secrecy, what legal guardrails exist to prevent mission creep or civilian harm, and who will hold contractors accountable if autonomous tools cause unintended consequences? The American people deserve real oversight from Congress and transparent answers from the Defense Department, not backroom deals wrapped in techno-babble and venture capital gloss.
We should never be naive about defending the homeland, but neither should we surrender accountability in the name of “innovation.” Prioritize hardened defenses, clear rules of engagement, and public oversight before unleashing autonomous cyber weapons that could boomerang on American citizens or be repurposed by our adversaries. The men and women who work and fight for this country deserve a government that protects them with prudence and responsibility, not secret experiments run by an elite few.
