Let Agentic AI speak unto Agentic AI — but in some kind of mathematical code.

That’s the thinking behind the MATHBAC (Mathematics for Boosting Agentic Communication) project, which aims to develop a new area of AI communication, one in which AI agents will ‘talk’ to each other to understand how they collaborate and share information.

MATHBAC is being run by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), one of the progenitors of the internet. It hopes the research will enable agentic AI models to collaborate to solve complex problems, and increase understanding of the mathematics that lies behind the ways that they function.

A key element of the project is discovering fundamentally new ways of working: Research that results only in incremental improvements in existing methods and models that already exist is specifically excluded from MATHBAC funding.

The project has been divided into two phases. The first will consider the derivation of the mathematics behind agentic AI and look at ways of improving communication between systems. The second, much more ambitious, will look to create tools to enable development of a new science, solving “fundamental scientific and mathematical problems underpinning collective agentic intelligence.”

DARPA expects to achieve all that in just 34 months, and is accepting proposals from organizations wishing to work on the project.