Introduction

The Open Atlas AI for Social Good Hackathon is the flagship Day 1 activation of Open Atlas Summit 2026 — America's largest gathering for high-skilled immigrants, founders, and investors building the next decade of American innovation.

Builders submit AI-powered solutions over a two-month window. The strongest teams come to Milpitas, California on August 21, 2026 to pitch live, demo their work in front of judges from leading AI labs and VCs, and compete for cash and sponsor prizes.

The theme is open-ended on purpose. We want range, not a single track. Pick a real problem. Build something real. Demo it on the main stage.

Tools and Technologies

You can build with whatever stack you want. The following tools are particularly well-suited to the AI for Social Good challenge and many come with free credits for registered hackers.

• OpenAI - GPT-5, o-series reasoning models, Whisper (speech), DALL-E (image)
• Anthropic - Claude Opus 4.7, Sonnet, Haiku
• Google - Gemini, MedGemma (healthcare-specific)
• Meta - Llama (open weights, run anywhere)
• Mistral, Cohere, xAI - Alternative foundation models

• AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure - Compute, storage, managed AI services
• Cloudflare Workers AI - Edge inference, no cold starts
• Vercel, Netlify - Instant deployment with shareable URLs
• Snowflake, MongoDB Atlas, Supabase - Data + vector storage

• LangChain, LlamaIndex - RAG and agent orchestration
• CrewAI, Composio, AutoGen - Multi-agent systems
• Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma - Vector databases for retrieval

• Lovable, v0, Cursor, Windsurf - AI-assisted UI generation
• Next.js, React, Vue - Web frameworks
• Streamlit, Gradio - Fast ML demo UIs
• Expo, React Native - Mobile

• ElevenLabs - Speech synthesis
• Deepgram, AssemblyAI - Speech-to-text
• Tone, Replicate - Audio/video model hosting

• GitHub Copilot, Claude Code - AI coding assistants
• Daytona - Cloud dev environments
• Sentry, PostHog - Observability and analytics

Sponsor credit distribution: After registering, check the #sponsor-credits channel in the Open Atlas Slack for active credit codes. New sponsors are added throughout the submission window.

Inspiration

Looking for ideas? Here are real projects from similar AI-for-social-good hackathons that demonstrate the kind of work that wins.

An AI agent that takes your insurance, ZIP code, and symptoms — then calls in-network doctors in parallel until it finds one available. Especially useful for immigrants and others unfamiliar with the US healthcare system.

An AI-powered tool that automates architectural plan review for building code compliance, lowering the cost of building affordable housing. Won 2nd place and was accepted into Y Combinator immediately after.

A conversational AI tool for the California Homeless Youth Project that lets young people share their story once, with empathy and consistency, instead of repeating it across multiple intake forms.

A computer-vision tool that helps city planners identify ADA accessibility barriers from street-view imagery — pointed at Oakland to start.

An app and hardware system that helps families support elderly relatives with cognitive decline, combining a caregiver app with simple voice-first hardware.

The pattern across winners: specific population, specific painful workflow, AI doing real work end-to-end, and a demo that makes the impact immediately obvious. Aim for that.

Contact Us & Support Channels

Open Atlas Slack — Primary channel for everything

• #general — Announcements
• #team-formation — Find teammates
• #sponsor-credits — API credit codes
• #help — Stuck on something technical
  

  Invite link sent automatically after you register on Devpost.

  Devpost Page

  For questions about the hackathon rules, eligibility, or submission process, post in the Discussion tab on this page. Per Devpost guidance, responses are posted publicly so all participants benefit equally.

  Email

  For private or sensitive questions: info@theopenatlas.org

  On-site at Demo Day (August 21, Milpitas)
  • Registration desk — Check in, get your badge
  • Mentor table — Look for orange "Mentor" lanyards
  • Organizers — Look for orange "Organizer" lanyards
  Organizing Team

  Sakshi Gupta & Anushk — Hackathon co-leads Open Atlas (Open Venture) — info@theopenatlas.org Website: openatlas.events

Additional Resource links