The CTU team secured first place in the latest round which grants them direct advancement to the finals of this international competition focused on trusted AI. The winners will be announced at the end of July 2025.

Since November 2024, ten elite university teams from around the world have competed in the Amazon Nova AI Challenge. The goal of the competition is to enhance the security of AI-assisted coding tools and develop new methods for automated red-teaming and robustness testing. The top eight teams have now advanced to the finals, where they will present cutting-edge security solutions for AI-assisted software development—four teams as Defenders (developing secure AI models) and four as Attackers (testing and identifying vulnerabilities).

Defender Teams

  • Team AlquistCoder – Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU)
  • Team PurpCorn-PLAN – University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (USA)
  • Team Lioncoders – Columbia University (USA)
  • Team Purpl3pwn3rs – Carnegie Mellon University (USA)

Attacker Teams

  • Team PurCL – Purdue University (USA)
  • Team SaFoLab – University of Wisconsin (USA)
  • Team RedTWIZ – NOVA University, Portugal
  • Team ASTRO – University of Texas at Dallas (USA)

In the challenge, Defender teams (including ours) are tasked with designing models that generate secure programming code (e.g., in Python) and resist exploitation attempts. Attacker teams aim to identify vulnerabilities in these models. The challenge simulates realistic conversations to test the models’ resistance to misuse or generation of insecure code.

"Advancing to the finals from first place is a great achievement and a confirmation of the hard work and quality of our entire team. We’re proud of the result we achieved in such a competitive field. It also motivates us to prepare even harder for the finals and continue improving our technology," says AlquistCoder team leader Ondřej Kobza.

Who is behind AlquistCoder?

‍The AlquistCoder team includes researchers and students from CIIRC CTU and our AI Center FEE CTU. It is led by Ondřej Kobza (CIIRC, FEE), with expert support from Jan Šedivý (CIIRC) and Sebastian Garcia (AIC FEE). The development team also includes Adam Černý and Ivan Dostál (both CIIRC), as well as researchers Maria Rigaki and Muris Sladić from AIC FEE.

Since 2017, the CTU team – Alquist AI – has successfully participated in every edition of Amazon’s previous competition, the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge, consistently placing among the top teams and winning the gold medal in 2021.

“For our Alquist team, the ability to leverage Amazon’s massive computing power was invaluable. It gave us a unique opportunity to gain hands-on experience with training a mid-sized LLM, which will be extremely useful for our future research,” says Jan Šedivý.

A Competition for the Elite‍

The Amazon Nova AI Challenge is open only to ten selected university teams worldwide, including such prestigious institutions as Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The final eight, with AlquistCoder as the top seed from the last round, will compete in an online tournament on June 26–27, 2025. The finals focus on real-world security scenarios in AI-assisted programming and will take place under the supervision of experts from Amazon AGI, AWS Responsible AI, Amazon Security, and others. The final results will be announced at the Amazon Nova AI Challenge Summit in Seattle on July 22–24, 2025, where teams will present their solutions and research outcomes.

Awards, Technology, and Research Impact‍

Each team has received a $250,000 grant and access to top-tier cloud resources and AI hardware, including AWS Trainium. Winning teams will receive up to an additional $250,000 in prizes. Amazon’s total investment in the challenge exceeds $5 million. However, the value of the competition goes far beyond funding – it represents a tangible contribution to the development of trustworthy and secure AI that can be safely integrated into everyday software development.

We wish the AlquistCoder team the best of luck in the competition and look forward to the final results!