The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is an organization, within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), that is responsible for leading research to overcome difficult challenges facing the United States Intelligence Community. IARPA characterizes its mission as follows: "To envision and lead high-risk, high-payoff research that delivers innovative technology for future overwhelming intelligence advantage."

IARPA funds academic and industry research across a broad range of technical areas, including mathematics, computer science, physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, linguistics, political science, and cognitive psychology. Most IARPA research is unclassified and openly published. IARPA transfers successful research results and technologies to other government agencies. Notable IARPA investments include quantum computing, superconducting computing, machine learning, and forecasting tournaments.

IARPA characterizes its mission as "to envision and lead high-risk, high-payoff research that delivers innovative technology for future overwhelming intelligence advantage".

In 1958, the first Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, was created in response to an unanticipated surprise—the Soviet Union's successful launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957. The ARPA model was designed to anticipate and pre-empt such technological surprises. As then-Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy said, "I want an agency that makes sure no important thing remains undone because it doesn't fit somebody's mission." The ARPA model has been characterized by ambitious technical goals, competitively awarded research led by term-limited staff, and independent testing and evaluation.

Authorized by the ODNI in 2006, IARPA was modeled after DARPA but focused on national intelligence, rather than military, needs. The agency was formed from a consolidation of the National Security Agency's Disruptive Technology Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's National Technology Alliance, and the Central Intelligence Agency's Intelligence Technology Innovation Center. IARPA operations began on October 1, 2007 with Lisa Porter as founding director. Its headquarters, a new building in M Square, the University of Maryland's research park in Riverdale Park, Maryland, was dedicated in April 2009.

In 2010, IARPA's quantum computing research was named Science magazine's Breakthrough of the Year. In 2015, IARPA was named to lead foundational research and development for the National Strategic Computing Initiative.^{[citation needed]} IARPA is also a part of other White House science and technology efforts, including the U.S. BRAIN Initiative, and the nanotechnology-inspired Grand Challenge for Future Computing. In 2013, The New York Times's op-ed columnist David Brooks called IARPA "one of the government's most creative agencies."

IARPA invests in multi-year research programs, in which academic and industry teams compete to solve a well-defined set of technical problems, regularly scored on a shared set of metrics and milestones. Each program is led by an IARPA Program Manager (PM) who is a term-limited Government employee. IARPA programs are meant to enable researchers to pursue ideas that are potentially disruptive to the status quo.

Most IARPA research is unclassified and openly published. Former director Jason Matheny has stated that the agency's goals of openness and external engagement serve to draw in expertise from academia and industry, or even individuals who "might be working in their basement on some data-science project and might have an idea for how to solve an important problem". IARPA transfers successful research results and technologies to other government agencies.