By browsing this website, submitting an application, or taking part in any round of the Programme, you confirm that you have read, understood and agreed to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you are applying on behalf of an educational institution or employer, you confirm you are permitted to do so.

CUBE 2026 runs in three rounds and a defence. Round 1 is an individual application, reviewed on evidence of what you have built. Round 2 (25–26 September 2026) is an individual build sprint inside a starter repository, with submissions closing 27 September 2026. Round 3 (7–9 October 2026) forms the 100 finalists into 20 pods of five, one specialist per domain. The Grand Finale on 10 October 2026 is a live system walkthrough and technical defence.

The kickoff on 18 September 2026 is planned in Hyderabad with online / hybrid access; the build rounds run online. Venue details are confirmed closer to the date. Dates, formats and venues may change. See “Changes to the Programme” below.

The Programme is open to students, software developers and engineers, AI and GenAI enthusiasts, aspiring AI engineers, full-stack and backend developers, product engineering enthusiasts, AI-agent builders, and developers working in startups and emerging tech.

You must be at least 16 years old to register. If you are under 18, you need the consent of a parent or legal guardian, and we may ask for written confirmation of it. Employees of Sydon and CodeQuesters, members of the judging panel, and their immediate families are not eligible to win prizes.

You are responsible for making sure that taking part does not breach any agreement you have with your employer or institution, including agreements about intellectual property and outside work.

Registration is free. There is no entry fee and no purchase of any kind is required or will improve your chances.

Applications are submitted through our registration partner and are reviewed on evidence: your public repositories, your commits, and projects you can explain end to end. Approximately 500 applicants are selected from around 1,000. Selection is at our sole discretion and we are not able to give individual feedback on unsuccessful applications.

You must apply as yourself, with accurate information. One person, one application. Applications that misrepresent authorship, experience or identity are removed.

Round 2 is entirely individual: one participant, one agent, one domain, working inside a starter repository we provide. Round 3 is teamwork: pods are formed by us from the finalists, one specialist per domain, and every agent must consume something another agent produces.

The starter repository, problem statements and any supporting material are licensed to you for the sole purpose of taking part in the Programme. You may not redistribute them, publish them, or use them commercially without our written permission.

You are responsible for your own hardware, software licences, internet access, API keys and cloud costs, and for keeping your own credentials secure. Never commit secrets, API keys or personal data to a repository you submit.

AI coding tools are permitted and expected: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Cursor or equivalents. Using them is not cheating.

You remain fully responsible for understanding, testing, validating, explaining and defending everything you submit. That responsibility is the actual assessment. Code you cannot explain in the defence will be scored as such.

You must have the right to use and submit everything in your submission, including any open-source dependency, model output, dataset or asset, and you must comply with its licence.

We want a Programme where people can do their best work. Harassment, discrimination, intimidation, doxxing, sustained disruption of sessions, and unwelcome attention of any kind are not tolerated, in any venue, chat channel or call.

You also agree not to plagiarise, submit work that is not substantially your own, sabotage another participant, attempt to gain unauthorised access to Programme infrastructure or another participant’s repository, or interfere with judging.

Report a concern to support@sydon.ai. We investigate and may remove anyone from the Programme, immediately and without refund of any kind, for a breach of this section.

You keep ownership of the code and materials you create during the Programme. We do not claim ownership of your submission, and taking part does not transfer your IP to us or to CodeQuesters.

Your submission must not infringe anyone else’s rights. If your work builds on something you do not own, you must have a licence that allows you to use it in the Programme.

So that we can actually run and talk about the Programme, you grant Sydon and CodeQuesters a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, run, evaluate, record and internally reproduce your submission for the purposes of operating and judging the Programme.

You also grant us a licence to show your submission, your name, your handle and screenshots or recordings of your work in coverage of the Programme: recaps, social posts, blog posts and showcases. This licence does not let us sell your work or use it in a commercial product. You can ask us to stop using your work in future publicity by writing to support@sydon.ai.

Problem statements, starter repositories, evaluation criteria and any material we mark as confidential are released to participants only, and only for the Programme. Do not publish or share them outside the Programme before we make them public.

You may publish your own submission after the Grand Finale on 10 October 2026, provided you remove anything of ours that is still confidential and any third-party material you are not licensed to publish.

Round 2 is assessed within each domain so that every pod gets one specialist per challenge. At the Grand Finale, judges assess both the system and the individual: architecture, decisions, failures, trade-offs, performance, and exactly what you contributed. There are no slides. The system runs live.

Judging is carried out by practising engineers. Scores, shortlists and final decisions are made at the judges’ discretion and are final. We may adjust criteria or weightings if a round has to change, and we will tell participants if we do.

The total cash prize pool is ₹50,000, awarded at the Grand Finale on 10 October 2026. The split between winners is announced with the results.

Prizes are personal to the winners, are not transferable, and cannot be exchanged for an alternative. Winners must provide the identity and payment details we need to make the transfer. Any taxes, duties or reporting obligations arising from a prize are the winner’s responsibility, and we may withhold amounts where the law requires it.

If a winner cannot be contacted within 30 days, does not provide the details we need, or is found to have breached these Terms, we may withdraw the prize and award it to another participant.

Exceptional participants continue the conversation with the Sydon.AI engineering team. This is an outcome of demonstrated ability across the whole Programme. It is not a guarantee of an interview, an offer or employment, and it is never decided by the final demo alone. Nothing in these Terms creates an employment relationship, and nothing here obliges us to hire anyone.

Sessions, demos and defences may be recorded or streamed. If you take part in a session, you agree that we may record it and use the recording to run and cover the Programme, as described in “The licence you grant us”.

Finalists are recognised publicly by Sydon.AI and CodeQuesters. If you would prefer not to appear in photography or recordings, tell us at support@sydon.ai before the session and we will do what we reasonably can to accommodate it.

Registration, code hosting, communication and video are provided by third parties, including our registration partner, code-hosting and communication platforms. Your use of those services is governed by their own terms and privacy policies, and we are not responsible for them.

This site links to third-party sites, including sydon.ai. We are not responsible for the content of any site we link to.

The Programme is a live event. We may change dates, venues, formats, domains, problem statements, round structure, judging criteria or prizes, and we may postpone, suspend or cancel the Programme, where we reasonably need to. We will publish material changes on this site and notify registered participants by email.

We may suspend or remove you from the Programme, disqualify a submission, or withdraw a prize if you breach these Terms, breach the code of conduct, misrepresent your work or identity, or act in a way that damages the Programme or another participant. Where it is fair to do so we will tell you why.

The design, text, graphics and code of this website are owned by Sydon or licensed to us. You may view and share the pages, but you may not copy the site, scrape it at a scale that burdens it, or attempt to gain unauthorised access to it.

We keep the site available on a reasonable-efforts basis. We do not promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free.

The Programme and this website are provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent permitted by law we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

We are not responsible for lost, corrupted or late submissions, for failures of a third-party platform, or for the loss of your own data. Keep your own backups.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Sydon will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for loss of profits, data, opportunity or goodwill, arising from the Programme or this website.

Our total liability arising out of or in connection with the Programme will not exceed ₹50,000. Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

You agree to indemnify Sydon and CodeQuesters against claims, losses and reasonable costs arising from your breach of these Terms, from your submission infringing someone else’s rights, or from your unlawful conduct in connection with the Programme.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Georgia, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules, and the courts of that state have jurisdiction over any dispute. Where you take part in an in-person session in India, you also remain subject to applicable local law, and nothing here removes a right you have under the mandatory consumer law of your own country.

We may update these Terms. The date at the top of this page shows when they last changed. Material changes are announced on this site and, for registered participants, by email. Continuing to use the site or take part in the Programme after a change means you accept the updated Terms.

Questions about these Terms go to support@sydon.ai.

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