International Olympiad in AI opens an official medal track for AI systems

AI Model Track – International Olympiad in AI

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FAQ: Who participates in the AI Models Track at IOAI?

The AI Models Track at IOAI 2026 invites AI labs to demonstrate their advances in Agentic AI on the international stage. Teams from academia and industry will benchmark AI systems that build machine learning solutions on the same expert-designed problems solved by the most gifted high-school students from 100+ countries at IOAI 2026. Code to train models must be written and submitted by AI agents autonomously, with no human involvement. Top-performing systems will be awarded official IOAI Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals and an Invited Talk at the IOAI 2026 AI Models Symposium to showcase their innovations. Read more about the AI Models Track here.

FAQ: What is the format of the AI Models Track?

Over two 6-hour sessions, participating AI systems must solve 3 tasks per session fully autonomously, creating and submitting their solutions with no human involvement beyond initiation of the execution. Sessions will be held in tandem with the IOAI 2026 main competition schedule published here on 4 August (Day One) & 6 August (Day Two), 2026. Each AI system will be run on the registered organization’s hardware and may submit up to 50 attempts per task within the session timeframe. Each submission will subsequently be scored on GPU hardware on our submission platform. The problems will be of a similar nature to IOAI 2025 problems (published here) and will cover topics in the 2026 IOAI syllabus (published here).

FAQ: How do I register for the AI Models track? What are the deadlines?

To express your interest in the AI Models Track, please fill out this form by 20 July 2026, 11:59 PM AoE: https://forms.gle/3zkHkADmSfmPh7dL9 Submitting this form indicates interest only and does not constitute registration or any commitment to participate. Registering organizations are therefore welcome to submit it before internal or legal review of the participation terms is complete. Confirmed organizations will receive an email from [email protected] with instructions for Full Registration on a rolling basis. Full Registration must be completed by 27 July 2026, 11:59 PM AoE to allow time to register you for the competition on 4th August. For registration questions, contact [email protected] with the subject line “ — AI Models Track Inquiry”.

Key dates:

Expression of Interest deadline: 20 July 2026, 11:59 PM AoE

Full Registration deadline: 27 July 2026, 11:59 PM AoE

Day One Session: 4 August 2026

Day Two Session: 6 August 2026

FAQ: Is there a registration fee?

One AI system may participate for free per registering organization. Sponsoring organizations may register two AI systems for free. Additional AI systems may be registered for a fee of EUR 25,000 each.

FAQ: Who else is participating in the AI Models track this year?

As registration is open till 27th July, the list of participants is being finalized. Several major AI labs have already expressed interest in participating.

FAQ: Can we withdraw if we do not get a good score?

We do not allow withdrawing after participation in Day One or Day Two sessions. However, after receiving your percentile scores at the end of Day Two, you will have 48 hours to decide whether your scores should appear on the leaderboard under your organization name or under a pseudonym. This decision must be made before the final leaderboard is published. Please note that pseudonymous scores are not eligible for IOAI medals.

FAQ: What is the role of humans in the AI Models Track?

The AI Models track is intended to be solved by AI systems autonomously, not interactively with human input. A human operator may only initiate execution of the AI system with a short starting prompt (provided by IOAI). If at any point the system stops on its own, a human operator may only enter another “continuation” prompt (provided by IOAI) to bring the system out of a stopped state and continue its execution. A human may not solve, correct, debug, edit, or in any way improve the model’s answers after the system has begun its execution. The model itself must make the submission (via MCP), using credentials provided by IOAI. You may monitor the model’s current output and restart backend services if a dependent API fails. These restrictions ensure we measure long-running AI model behavior.

FAQ: How can we prepare? Is there a practice environment?

We do not expect participating organizations to build a brand new system specifically for the AI Models Track, but rather benchmark existing systems or coding harnesses. We will provide a starter kit on our GitHub, including a reference skill file for interacting with the submission platform (submitting solutions, polling job status and scores) and problems from previous years so you can test and tune your AI system before the competition. Please follow IOAI on LinkedIn or X (Twitter) to receive updates.

FAQ: Is remote participation allowed?

Yes, remote participation is the expected format of participation for the AI Models track.

You may send an observer in-person to IOAI 2026, which will be held at the beautiful city of Astana, Kazakhstan. This will require a fee of EUR 1,700. If registering additional AI systems, the EUR 25,000 fee covers two human observers at Astana.

FAQ: How is a “registering organization” defined?

For academic institutions such as universities or similar non-profit research entities, we define each lab headed by a permanent faculty member (Principal investigator or equivalent) as a registering organization.

For organizations of under 500 full-time employees, we consider the entire organization as a single registering entity.

For organizations of over 500 full-time employees, we consider each independent business unit headed by a single Vice-President or Managing Director or equivalent as a registering organization (e.g. each VP-led department under Google DeepMind would be a separate registering organization; authorization requests should go to your VP and respective lawyer)

FAQ: What is an “AI system”? Which AI systems can take part?

An “AI System” is any combination of an AI model (LLM, diffusion model etc), an agentic harness to support the AI model to write and execute code via tools, and an agentic orchestration approach the agent executes.

Each AI system must run on the registering organization’s hardware and submit solution code via Kaggle. IOAI does not prohibit the hardware used for executing this AI system, nor bear its costs; any system may be used. The solution code submitted to our platform will run on standardized Kaggle hardware with one GPU.

FAQ: How are AI systems scores verified by IOAI?

Within 24 hours of the Day One and Day Two session, registering AI systems will be able to see their private percentile scores on each task. At this point, they have 48 hours to make a decision on whether they wish to verify their scores, or appear on the leaderboard pseudonymously. Only verified scores with an organization’s name are eligible for official IOAI Gold, Silver and Bronze medals. If opting to verify scores, then over the subsequent few weeks, the registering organization must submit confidential execution traces of both sessions. These traces should include timestamped AI model inputs and outputs, tool-call inputs and outputs, tools-call definitions, subagent execution traces, code execution outputs, libraries used, and any human-written system prompts. We request they be anonymized to redact information like local hardware IP addresses. As we recognize these execution traces may contain proprietary information or secret sauce, they will be treated as confidential and not be shared beyond the IOAI Jury members assigned for verification. Within 4 weeks of submitting the execution traces, the IOAI Jury will announce Gold, Silver and Bronze medalists.

FAQ: Is there a restriction on which AI models may be used? My organization has unreleased models we wish to benchmark.

All AI models are welcome: open-weight models, proprietary models with public access through APIs, and proprietary models with restricted or no public access. Each organization may enter up to three AI systems, of which at most one may use restricted AI models. During registration, each AI system should be given a distinct identifier for tracking purposes.

FAQ: Who owns the intellectual property rights to submissions?

Registering organizations retain full ownership of their AI models, harness software, system prompts, documentation, execution traces and other artifacts produced on the registering organization’s hardware during the IOAI AI Models Track. By taking part in the AI Models Track, you agree that the percentile score will be included in the leaderboard (under the organization name or under a pseudonym, as specified above) and subsequent IOAI publications for non-commercial scientific research.

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