Open Agent Hackathon 2026
Ship an agent that survives contact with the real world.
Registration closes in
About the event
Ship an agent that survives contact with the real world.
Open Agent Hackathon 2026 convenes thousands of builders from 100+ countries for 72 hours of focused development. The mandate: build an agent that solves a real problem, not a demo, not a toy, an agent that does actual work for a real user, industry, or community.
No fixed theme. No narrow track. Builders choose the problem; the bar is that it's real and the agent actually solves it.
Participants get direct access to mentors, live technical workshops, sponsor-backed challenge tracks, and a prize pool of up to $20,000. Fully online. 7–9 October 2026.
Key dates
6 dates that matter — all times UTC
Challenge tracks
Pick one track. Build for it.
Agents that ship code
Autonomous contributors that open a pull request a human is happy to merge — tests, migrations and rollback included.
Operations copilots
Agents that hold a real on-call rotation: read telemetry, propose the fix, and know when to escalate to a person.
Open agent infrastructure
Runtimes, evals, memory layers and observability that other teams can adopt after the weekend ends.
Research agents
Literature, data and market research agents that cite their sources and are honest about what they could not verify.
Agents for the public sector
Services for universities, municipalities and NGOs — accessibility and auditability are part of the score.
Prizes & scoring
Prize pool Up to $20,000
Highest overall score across all tracks, plus a feature in the community showcase.
Second overall. Split equally among team members by default.
Third overall, decided on the Impact score in the event of a tie.
Official rules
10 sections. Read what applies to you.
- 1.1Open worldwide to anyone aged 16 or older at the start of the build window.
- 1.2Employees of the organiser and of judging sponsors may participate but are not eligible for cash prizes.
- 1.3One account per participant. Duplicate accounts disqualify the whole team.
FAQ
Still deciding?
No. Registration, the platform workspace, mentor office hours and submission are all free.
Community
Where the hackathon actually happens
Discord is the event floor: announcements, track rooms, team-finding, mentor office hours and the results call.
Registration closes Oct 5, 2026, 00:00 UTC
Ship an agent that survives contact with the real world.
40 builders registered so far. One sign-up gets you the event, the Discord server and community updates.