Round 3 finalists are announced on 6 October 2026, following evaluation between 28 September and 5 October. One hundred finalists are grouped into twenty pods of five, with one specialist per challenge domain in every pod.

Your agent was never meant to work alone

Round 3 runs from 7 to 9 October 2026. Five independent agents become one system. Every agent must consume something another agent produces, and the pod has to ship end-to-end workflows that no single agent could complete alone.

• Real cross-agent dependencies, not a shared README
• Interfaces negotiated between people who each own their side
• Failure in one agent is visible in the whole system
• The pod ships together or not at all

What this actually tests

Integration is where most hackathon work quietly falls apart, because it is the first point at which your assumptions meet someone else’s. Collaboration here is an engineering skill, not a soft one.

Then the defence

Pods present at the Grand Finale on 10 October 2026, where judges assess both the system and the individual contribution inside it.

Integration: 7–9 October 2026. Grand Finale: 10 October 2026.