Holistic AI x UCL AI Society Hackathon

Forging Agentic AI's Future with Strength, Visibility and Trust

Build and test AI agents that demonstrate performance, transparency, and safety in action. Compete for $65,000 in prizes and the opportunity to co-author and publish research findings.

November 15-16, 2025

UCL East Campus, London

About

The Great Agent Hack 2025 is an annual event that brings together researchers, students, and professionals to explore what’s next at the intersection of AI innovation and trust.

Challenge Tracks

Agent Iron Man

Build agents that don’t break.

Engineer AI agents that are fast, efficient, and robust in real-world environments. Optimize latency, cost, and carbon footprint while hardening systems against prompt attacks, broken tools, and chaotic inputs - design agents built for production endurance.

Agent Glass Box

Follow the trajectory. Understand the behavior.

Agents act, remember, observe, and adapt — but why? This track unlocks full transparency: capture every decision step, memory update, and tool interaction. Visualize reasoning trajectories, reveal hidden shortcuts, and enable true auditability. Turn opaque autonomy into explainable behavior.

Dear Grandma

Attack like a red-team. Defend like a guardian

Uncover the cracks. Stress-test agent behavior with adversarial prompts, trust-building exploitation, multi-turn manipulation, and tool misuse. Detect deception, exfiltration, and safety violations before they reach the real world. Break to learn - defend to deploy.

Judges

Emre Kazim

Co-Founder & Co-CEO @ Holistic AI

Graca Carvalho

Director - UCL Centre for Digital Innovation @ University College London

César Ortega Quintero

Expert Data Scientist @ MAPFRE

Giuseppe Battista

Senior Solutions Architect @ AWS

John Adelana

Senior Solutions Architect @ AWS

Raj Patel

AI Transformation Lead @ Holistic AI

Zekun Wu

Senior Research Scientist, Lead in Agentic AI @ Holistic AI

Hirsh Pithadia

Co-Founder, CEO @ Valyu

Sergio Correa

Founder @ BMW Q✦Lab

Tigmanshu Bhatnagar

Assistant Professor @ University College London

Daan Ferdinandusse

Founder @ Entrepreneurs First

Harvey Yorke

Co-Founder, CTO @ Valyu

Alexander Ng

Co-Founder, Head of AI @ Valyu

Seonglae Cho

Research Engineer @ Holistic AI

Kleyton da Costa

Research Scientist @ Holistic AI

Rahul Patel

Performance Marketing Lead & LLM Security Testing @ Holistic AI

Why Participate

Push the boundaries of what AI agents can do — and how safely they can do it.

Build and test real-world agents tackling challenges in performance, transparency, and safety.

Learn from experts at Holistic AI, UCL, and partner organizations.

Compete for over $65,000 in prizes awarded to top-performing teams.

Co-author and publish research emerging from the Hackathon’s findings.

Join our community of builders, researchers, and problem-solvers.

Why Participants Say

Hear from past participants about their experience

"Participating in the Holistic AI Hackathon 2025 was a truly defining moment."

— Previous Participant

"The research idea from the winning project was later developed into an academic paper, CorrSteer, which I am very proud of."

— 2024 Winner

"The hackathon connected me with talented peers and teammates and ultimately led to a four-month internship with Holistic AI."

— 2024 Participant

"This rare, research-focused and student-friendly event provides substantial support for student life."

— Student Participant

Final List of Awards & Winners

SPECIAL RECOGNITION

MOST HOLISTIC AI AWARD

Team The Luck Stroke

MOST VALYU AWARD

Team Illusion

MOST AWS AWARD

Team Fairquote

MOST NVIDIA AWARD

Team MI5 Agents

MOST MAPFRE AWARD

Team CRD2

MOST ROBOTICS AWARD

Team HSIA

MOST FRUGAL AWARD

Team SmartGuard

MOST RESEARCH IMPACT AWARD

Team GenAI Explainer

MOST CREATIVE AWARD

Team ThermoTrace

MOST SUSTAINABLE AWARD

Team BiasSphere

MOST PRODUCTION-READY AWARD

Team Beaconn

MYSTERY

HIGHEST RESOURCE USAGE AWARD

Team GenAI Explainer

GRANDMA DISCOVERY AWARD

Team AIsians

PUBLIC CHOICE AWARD

Team PharmaMiku

BEST PITCH AWARD

Team Beaconn

THE BRAVE SOLDIER AWARD

Team Glassbox Labs

TRACK WINNERS (1st, 2nd, 3rd PLACE)

Track A — Agent Iron Man

1st PLACE

Team Project Emotions

2nd PLACE

Team Jailbreak Lab

3rd PLACE

Team Illusion

Track B — Agent Glass Box

1st PLACE

Team ZarksAI

2nd PLACE

Team CRD2

3rd PLACE

Team GenAI Explainer

Track C — Dear Grandma

1st PLACE

Team HSIA

2nd PLACE

Team BiasSphere

3rd PLACE

Team Introspect AI

GRAND CHAMPION

GRAND CHAMPION of the GREAT AGENT HACK

🏆 Team Jailbreak Lab

Sponsors & Partners

This year’s hackathon is made possible through the generous support of organizations committed to balancing innovation with safety and opportunity with responsibility.

Ready to Shape the Future of AI?

Join 200 innovators building the next generation of responsible AI agents