Amazon Connects with the AI Community Through Building, Research, and Shared Learning

Two programs centered on Amazon Nova have launched side by side, drawing in developers and researchers at the same time. One is a 6-week hackathon open to developers worldwide, and the other is an 8-month university research challenge on the theme of trusted AI agents.

The hackathon targets professional developers, students, and hobbyists alike, and recruits projects across 5 categories: Agentic AI, multimodal understanding, UI automation, Voice AI, and Freestyle experimentation. Participants can use whatever tools and frameworks they want, but must leverage Nova foundation models or Nova Act, and will be evaluated not just on completeness but also on their experimentation process, creativity, and business/community impact.

The research challenge involves 10 university teams from 5 countries, focusing on building AI agents that can carry out complex software development workflows while maintaining safeguards. Teams are evaluated on two axes—utility and safety—with a separate red team checking for vulnerabilities. This year, access to Nova Forge is provided, allowing university research to customize models in a way that's closer to actual product development, and all teams will publish their results in papers to share their research outcomes externally.