Presented by SEED Global Education
Machines have started making calls on their own. Spend this hackathon working out which ones they should be allowed, under the 2026 theme
SEED Global Education helps students reach the world's best universities. This hackathon skips the essay and the waiting. You take a real problem, build it with two or three others, and show admissions what you shipped.
The Age of Autonomy is the 2026 brief. Software is being handed decisions that used to be ours, and most of it still cannot explain itself. Winning teams build the receipts. Show us an agent that can be audited as well as demoed.
Pick one and go deep. Every brief is deliberately open-ended, because the jury rewards the team that frames the problem best, not the one that builds the most.
Stop clicking through dashboards. Use MCP to expose your systems as tools so an AI client becomes the interface, describe the work in plain language, and it runs against real systems with no UI in the loop.
Win by taking a job your team does every week off the screen entirely.
One agent is one worker with one attention span. Build an org chart instead: an orchestrator that decomposes the problem, specialists that own narrow domains, workers running in parallel, and reviewers that verify before anything counts as done.
Win by making the hierarchy produce better output than one agent trying harder.
Ten agents are working. One just broke something. What changed, who changed it, and how fast can you undo it? Build the accountability layer: per-agent identity on every action, live monitoring, containment, and precise rollback that reverses one agent's damage without discarding everyone else's work.
Win on time-to-identify, time-to-contain, and clean recovery.
The full schedule, start to finish. Registered teams get each milestone by email as it comes up.
Short of a teammate? Tell us and we pair you with people who fill your gaps.
Your thousand-word abstract is due. Nothing is accepted after this date.
The teams advancing to the prototyping round are announced.
Just under two weeks to build, with cloud credits and checkpoints.
One-to-one sessions with engineers, founders and partner faculty.
Finalists present to the jury. Every prize is announced the same day.
Two teams take each placing, so every figure below is per team. Every placing team also leaves with a tuition scholarship of up to 75% at a partner university and an application fee waiver, applied at the point of admission.
No. The strongest teams mix engineering with design, business sense and domain knowledge. If you can push a working prototype and a credible pitch forward, there is a seat for you, and mentors are on hand for the whole sprint.
Anyone with a background in computers or technology. That covers:
Teams may mix all of them.
Teams are two to three people. If you are short of teammates, we match you on skills and on the sub-theme you picked, so nobody is left hunting for a team.
Winning and runner-up teams receive tuition scholarship offers from our partner universities, subject to meeting each university's academic threshold and completing a full application for the stated intake.
Nothing. Entry is free and the tooling for shortlisted teams is covered. You keep whatever you build, and placing teams also take cash, a scholarship offer and an application fee waiver.
₹2,00,000 in prizes, scholarships of up to 75% at partner universities, and a project worth putting your name on. Entry is free.
