​Build the tech we need to defend the world from advanced threats

​A one-day Def/Acc hackathon in San Francisco.

​
📅 Nov 22, 2025
📍 Vivarium SF in San Francisco

​Sponsored by Halcyon Futures.

Halcyon identifies leaders from business, policy, and academia, and helps them build a secure and resilient world for the era of transformative artificial intelligence.

​Also sponsored by MATS, Prime Intellect, SPAR, Apart Research and Workshop Labs.

​The problem:

​The future is extremely promising. Ending disease, flying cars, abundance, the usual suspects. But the future also has some advanced dangers. Tech like AI is dual use: it can be really good, but it can be used for bad.

​Offensive AI capabilities spread in seconds. Our defenses often take years.

​A bio student, some compute + Kimi can now explore dangerous pathogen designs. Automated tools find vulnerabilities faster than we can patch them. This asymmetry is accelerating.

​Enter def/acc. We need to accelerate defenses to big risks, so we get the benefits. If you can build the tech to block the dangers, you get the good future.

​What we're building:

​Prototypes of defenses for advanced threats. Some ideas include

​⚙️ AI:

• ​Trusted models monitoring untrusted ones

• ​Scalable oversight - techniques for supervising AI systems that are more capable than their human overseers

• ​Alignment evaluation and intervention - measuring which values AI systems pursue and methods to improve alignment

​🦠 Biosecurity 

• ​Environmental pathogen surveillance

• ​DNA synthesis screening

• ​Early warning systems that could prevent the next pandemic

​🛡️ Cybersecurity

• ​AI red-teaming for critical infrastructure

• ​Formal verification of critical code

• ​Memory-safe refactoring (c++ → rust)

​🤖 Privacy, Trust, and Coordination:

• ​Privacy-preserving verification, audit, and threat intelligence tools

• ​Defenses against privacy-violating intrusive AI

• ​⁠Confidential computing for ML workloads

​More project ideas here:

• ​Breaking The Intelligence Curse by Rudolf Laine and Luke Drago

• ​My Techno-Optimism by Vitalik Buterin

• ​What is def/acc anyways? by Matt Clifford

​🏆 Prizes & Opportunities

• ​$10,000 in prizes

• ​Fully-funded spot in bluedot's december incubator week (dec 1-5) for the winning team

​Schedule

​Saturday Nov 22
10:00 AM - Doors Open
10:30 AM - Opening Ceremony & Team Formation
6:00 PM - Submission deadline
7:00 pm - Winners announced

​Who should come?

​Engineers ready to build. Researchers ready to implement. Anyone who believes defensive technology is under-invested relative to its importance. We'll keep a high talent bar.

​We provide

• ​Space + dinner & snacks

• ​mentorship & domain expertise

• ​If you're good, a direct path to scale your solution into a company

• ​$400 in compute credits to build! (sign up here for compute credits) + Prime Intellect Compute Credits

​Judges Include

• ​Vie McCoy (OpenAI Redteaming)

• ​Ryan Kidd (MATS Co-founder)

• ​Gideon Futerman (CAIS Researcher)

• ​Samuel Hammond (Foundation for American Innovation Chief Economist)

• ​Esben Kran (Seldon Lab + Apart Research Founder)

• ​Kristian Rönn (Lucid Computing Co-founder)

• ​Danylo Tymoshenko (Dash Crystal Corporation Co-founder)

• ​Celeste Jessin (Independent Cybersecurity Researcher)

​Hosted by BlueDot Impact - the leading talent accelerator for beneficial AI and societal defenses.

Sponsored by Halcyon Futures, MATS, Prime Intellect, SPAR, Apart Research and Workshop Labs.