Rules and Guidelines

Clear rules make fair competition.

Foundry’s rules exist to protect honest teams. Read them once before you start and once before Lock 3 — they are short, and they are enforced.

Submissions

Submission rules.

Required

Submit each lock before your team’s deadline shown in the dashboard
Work must be your team’s own, created during the season
Third-party code, models and datasets must be licensed and attributed
Lock 3 requires a working prototype, repository access and a contribution declaration from every member
Known limitations must be disclosed honestly

Not allowed

Submitting work built before the season as if new
Fabricated demos, mocked outputs presented as functional, staged results
Plagiarised content in any submission
Sharing one member across multiple teams
Misrepresenting who built what

AI-Use Policy

You are building with AI — use it honestly.

AI assistance is welcome

Using AI coding assistants, design tools and language models to build faster is legitimate modern engineering.

Understanding is mandatory

Your team must be able to explain every part of its submission. The finals jury will ask.

Disclosure builds trust

Significant AI-generated components should be identified in your documentation, like any other dependency.

Your product’s AI must be real

The AI functionality you claim must exist and run. Hard-coded theatre is a disqualification ground.

Conduct

How we treat each other.

Expected

Respectful conduct toward participants, mentors, evaluators, jury and hosts
Honest communication with the support desk
Care with any user data your project touches
Following venue rules at the physical finals

Disqualification grounds

Plagiarism or fabricated submissions
Harassment or discrimination in any programme space
Attempting to manipulate evaluation or evaluators
Misuse of other participants’ data or work
Serious breach of venue or event rules

Intellectual property stays with your team; submitting grants StudAI One a limited licence to evaluate your work and feature approved showcase material — the exact terms are in the Terms and Conditions. Decisions on rule violations are made by the organisers with human review, and material findings are communicated to the affected team by email.

Fair rules. Real competition.

Build honestly and the rules will never be in your way.