Aptima to work with DARPA to commercialize defenses against synthetic and manipulated media

Woburn, MA – May 14, 2025 — Aptima, Inc., a leader in optimizing human performance through innovative technologies, announced today it has been awarded a contract by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Commercial Strategy Office to lead a new commercialization effort focused on one of today’s most urgent challenges: making reliable media forensic capabilities available to users to help mitigate online threats perpetuated via synthetic and manipulated media.

With AI-generated images, audio, and video becoming more convincing and pervasive, society is struggling to keep pace. The emerging tools and standards required to help people understand the authenticity or origins of what they’re reading, watching, and listening have yet to be adopted at internet scale  — leaving individuals, institutions, and industries without a reliable foundation to determine if content is authentic.

“As falsified media technologies improve, they move faster than traditional forensic tools, leaving industries without reliable ways to spot and fight advanced media manipulations, like deepfakes,” said Shawn Weil, Chief Growth Officer at Aptima. “DARPA is leading the way to fill this gap by going beyond improving detection capabilities, developing better ways to determine why and how content has been synthesized or manipulated – ultimately enabling trust and security in digital media across different sectors.”

Through this effort, Aptima will leverage its role as the test and evaluation lead for DARPA’s Semantic Forensics (SemaFor) program to explore commercial pathways that can help bridge the gap between cutting-edge analytics and commercially available products.

“This is a crucial step toward creating a more trustworthy digital ecosystem,” added Weil. “We’re thrilled to be working with DARPA to chart a path forward—one that connects innovation with real-world need.”