AI Immune System: Detection Challenge — Now Open

Can AI detect dangerous intent concealed within AI agent conversations?

We are pleased to announce the launch of the AI Immune System: Detection Challenge, organized jointly by the AI Alignment Network Intelligence Symbiosis Chapter (ISc/ALIGN), Kentaro Inui (MBZUAI), and Bitgrit Inc. This is the first empirical test of a core component of the AI Immune System (AIS).

🔗 Competition page: https://bitgrit.net/competition/27 💰 Total prize pool: $3,000　　 💬 Community: https://discord.com/invite/rQ8Ev2DqbF

Task Overview

This competition is the world's first practical challenge toward realizing an AI Immune System — a framework, inspired by biological immunity, in which AI agents monitor one another to detect and respond to abnormal or unsafe behavior.

Participants will build models to identify dangerous or unsafe statements embedded within AI agent conversations, where harmful intent may be obscured by natural-sounding or indirect language. The conversations reflect realistic machine-to-machine interactions: risk does not appear as explicit commands or overtly malicious content, but is woven into otherwise ordinary exchanges.

The core difficulty is well-known in AI safety work: threats that slip past simple rules, keyword filters, or direct reading — and that may not be obvious even to a careful human reviewer. Strong solutions will need to look past surface-level text and find subtler statistical, semantic, or structural patterns.

• Data format: JSONL
• Labels: TRUE (harmful) / FALSE (non-harmful)

This is the world's first practical challenge to automatically detect risks hidden within machine-to-machine conversations — risks that would be invisible to the human eye.

One important note: not all coordination between AI agents is harmful. Coordination that genuinely benefits all parties — humans included — is labelled benign. Distinguishing the two requires contextual judgment, not just pattern matching, and that is precisely what this challenge is designed to probe.

Prizes

Participation Requirements

• Individuals only — team submissions are not permitted
• NDA required — participants must agree to a non-disclosure agreement on the competition page before downloading data
• Submission limit: 5 per day
• External data: not permitted
• Prize claim: winners must provide all source code, a requirements file, and a README with clear reproduction instructions

Timeline

Background — What AIS Is and Why This Challenge Matters

This challenge targets Layer 1: Edge Sensors, the outermost layer of AIS's four-layer defense architecture.

As shown in the figure above, AIS rests on two foundations. The Trust Infrastructure serves as a kind of civil registry and trust ledger for AI agents — recording who each agent is and building a verifiable history of whether it can be trusted. The Surveillance & Control Infrastructure enables AI agents to monitor one another in real time and intervene when behavior drifts outside acceptable bounds. Edge Sensors are the frontline of that second pillar, and this challenge is their first real-world test.

The underlying idea mirrors biological immunity: just as the human immune system detects threats that lie below conscious perception, AIS is designed to catch risks that humans alone would miss or could not process quickly enough.

📄 AIS overview: https://intelligence-symbiosis.net/en/ais

The urgency is real. Since 2025, leaders at major AI labs have spoken openly about AGI and superintelligence arriving within a few years. Once AI systems surpass human cognitive capacity across the board, direct human oversight of every agent becomes untenable. AIS is one concrete answer to that problem — and building it requires the kind of empirical grounding this challenge is meant to provide.

📄 Full background: https://intelligence-symbiosis.net/en/ais/why-ais

Building a society in which advanced AI and humanity genuinely coexist requires infrastructure capable of monitoring and checking deviant behavior across AI society. This challenge is a concrete first step toward that.

Co-Organisers

Organising Bodies

We hope you will join us.

🔗 Register: https://bitgrit.net/competition/27