Secret Loyalties Hackathon
The Montréal node of the Secret Loyalties Hackathon, a weekend research sprint at Ω Labs, organized with Apart Research and Formation Research.
RSVP here and on the official page to be admissible: https://apartresearch.com/sprints/secret-loyalties-hackathon-2026-07-24-to-2026-07-26
A model has a secret loyalty when it has been intentionally caused to advance a specific principal's interests (a nation-state, corporation, leader, or individual) without this being disclosed to operators, auditors, or users. Secretly loyal AI slips past governance, markets, and public scrutiny. Over one weekend, build the model organisms, detection methods, and defenses to catch it before the threat matures.
Tracks:
Model organisms: build reproducible secretly loyal models spanning the activation-breadth and action-breadth space
Detection and auditing: can black-box auditing and interpretability probes tell a secretly loyal model from a clean one?
Defenses and remediation: test whether existing backdoor defenses transfer, and whether loyalties can be removed post-hoc
Attack feasibility and safety-infrastructure robustness: data poisoning, multi-stage priming, reasoning-trace poisoning, chain-of-command hijacking
Threat modeling, forecasting and governance (non-technical): catastrophic vignettes, insider-threat case studies, capability forecasting
Schedule:
Fri Jul 24, evening: kickoff, keynote and threat-model briefing, team formation
Sat Jul 25: build
Sun Jul 26: final pushes, submissions, demos. Submissions due 11:59 PM AoE
Top teams are invited to continue through Apart's Partnered Fellowships: Apart provides operations, infrastructure, and compute, while research partners provide mentorship. Promising projects have a pathway toward a publishable write-up.
Who should join: ML researchers and engineers comfortable fine-tuning open-weight models, interpretability researchers, red-teamers, and, for the non-technical track, governance researchers, forecasters, and strong writers. No prior secret-loyalty experience required. Bring your laptop.
Où / Where:
Ω Labs, 3813 Saint-Denis (parking spot available on request)
Contact host if you need assistance or for questions.
Ω Labs is a community space funded from member contributions. Your donation keeps the space open and the snacks coming.