CBAI Boston Biosecurity Hackathon

A hands-on AI challenge for life scientists. No coding required. Join the ASTRAL team and CBAI for a day of hands-on AI testing, friendly competition, and conversation about biosecurity. This is not a typical coding hackathon. You won’t need to build an app or train a model. Throughout the day, we’ll explore both ordinary scientific use and adversarial red-teaming. That means trying realistic scientific questions using public or fictional examples, as well as taking on challenges that test how AI responds to difficult requests and safety boundaries. The resulting dataset supports CBAI's ASTRAL project (an open-source scanner for biological-misuse risk in AI logs) and will be made available to qualified biosecurity research groups under a research-use governance framework. CBAI is sponsoring $5,000 in cash prizes. CBAI will also provide food and cover token costs. Successful applicants include: Research assistants, students with research experience, postdocs, industry scientists, clinicians, public-health researchers, and others. We also encourage people with relevant adjacent backgrounds to express interest. Alongside the competition, the event is an opportunity to learn about AI and biosecurity, meet people across the local research community, and contribute to the ASTRAL team’s research on evaluating AI conversations and potential misuse. This is a research event: Transcripts are governed under a documented retention policy shared with participants in advance. Misuse takes place inside a hosted environment under CBAI's accounts, not on participants' own accounts. Questions? Reach out to ASTRAL@detection.bio.