The Amazon Nova AI Challenge supports the responsible development of artificial intelligence by connecting academia with industry and providing access to cutting-edge research resources. This year's challenge focuses on the area of "Trusted AI: an advanced secure AI-assisted development environment", which aims to improve the security and reliability of software applications.
The CTU - Alquist AI team has successfully participated in all editions of the Amazon competition since 2017, back then still under the name Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge, and always placed on the podium, and in 2021 the team even won a gold medal.
This year, the AlquistCoder team is led by Ondřej Kobza with the support of academic advisors - Jan Šedivý from the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics (CIIRC) and Sebastian Garcia from the Stratosphere Laboratory at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering (AIC FEE). Adam Černý and Ivan Dostal (both CIIRC) are also involved in the development of the solution, along with Maria Rigaki, Muris Sladić and Vladyslav Babec (all AIC FEE).
"The Amazon Nova AI Challenge is a great initiative from Amazon to help improve the security of large language models - LLMs. Our team is working on a model that generates safe and trustworthy programming code (for example in Python) and is tested against attacks from other teams. Our strategy is still secret, but it is safe to say that it involves rigorous training using cybersecurity knowledge and extensive testing using our own internal attack system," explains Sebastian Garcia from AIC FEE explains Amazon's challenge.
"We are proud that the Czech Technical University in Prague is participating in the Amazon Nova AI Challenge. This initiative fits perfectly with our commitment to support education and research in the field of artificial intelligence. At AWS, we believe that AI is a transformative technology with enormous potential, and we are committed to making AI education accessible around the world. CTU's participation in this competition not only demonstrates the quality of AI talent in the Czech Republic, but also contributes to our goal of fostering innovation in generative AI. We look forward to the innovative solutions that will come out of this collaboration," said Jiří Svěrák, Public Sector Manager at Amazon Web Services in the Czech Republic.
Competition format
The competition is run as a tournament in which ten university teams face off - five teams focus on developing AI models (defensive teams) and the other five on finding their vulnerabilities (offensive teams). Each defensive team will face all five offensive teams, which will use automated techniques to test the security of the generated code. The Amazon Nova team developed a custom model for this competition on AWS Trainium hardware, supporting open and collaborative research in secure software development.
The first round of the tournament took place in January 2025, while the final round will take place in June 2025. All teams will then publish their research studies, contributing to the broader development of responsible AI in code generation.
Participants of the competition
The five selected university teams in the AI model development category include:
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Columbia University
- Czech Technical University in Prague
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
- Virginia Tech
The five varsity offensive teams consist of:
- NOVA School of Science and Technology, Lisbon
- Purdue University
- University of California, Davis
- University of Texas at Dallas
- University of Wisconsin Madison
Motivation and importance of competition
The competition format allows teams to effectively test their strategies while quickly adapting to new challenges. "We've brought together the best and brightest academic talent to not only compete, but to collaboratively tackle one of the most important real-world challenges of generative AI - safe and reliable software development," says Rohit Prasad, senior vice president of Amazon Artificial General Intelligence. "We designed this challenge as a unique, dynamic tournament to accelerate academic research toward practical application. In the spirit of Amazon tradition, I look forward to watching the teams work hard, enjoy the competition, and make history along the way to the finals," Prasad added.
Amazon, in partnership with universities, sees this challenge as a way to support young talent and the development of AI security solutions. "This project goes beyond theoretical research - we're looking for concrete methods to identify security threats and protect AI-assisted programming tools," highlights Steve Schmidt, Amazon's security director.
Each team will receive a $250,000 grant, monthly AWS credits, and the opportunity to compete for grand prizes. The winning teams in both categories will receive an additional $250,000, while the runner-up teams will receive $100,000. Amazon's total investment in the competition exceeds $5 million.
CTU's participation in this prestigious competition represents a significant opportunity for Czech academia. The team has access to the latest technologies in the field of artificial intelligence, including AWS Trainium - specialized AI hardware for training large-scale language models.
The Amazon Nova AI Challenge is an important step towards strengthening the safety and credibility of AI in software development. CTU and its team confirm their role among the top universities in the field of AI and software engineering.
More information about the competition can be found on the Amazon Science Blog.
