Hack Apertus Online 2026
Online hackathon to test and build on Apertus, the open Swiss LLM. Four track winners get CHF 2,500 each. Submit by 16 October 2026.
Hack Apertus Online is the first stage of a hackathon series built around Apertus, the fully open large language model from Switzerland. It runs online from 1 to 16 October 2026 on Devpost. Builders work with the 8B and 70B Apertus models and can book sessions with mentors.
There are two tracks. Apertus Readiness is about improving the model: red teaming it to find bias, private data leaks or wrong outputs, or checking how well it handles Swiss languages, dialects and local knowledge. Apertus Adoption is about building a prototype on Apertus, either for a partner challenge from academia or for your own new idea.
The prize list totals €10,680 in cash. The winner of each of the four challenges gets CHF 2,500 plus Hugging Face credits and a place in the Grand Finals for the main Hack Apertus Award on 14 May 2027 in St. Gallen. Runners up get credits, certificates and in some cases a slot to present at later events.
Anyone aged 18 or over can join, alone or in a team of up to 5 people. Devpost's standard country exceptions apply. Registration opened on 13 August 2026. Challenges are released on 1 October at 12:00 CEST and the final submission deadline is 16 October 2026 at 12:00 CEST. The organizers say there will be no extension.
Judging runs from 16 to 22 October and winners are expected on 23 October 2026. For own projects the jury looks at purposeful use of AI, technical rigour, value and scalability, sovereign deployability and feasibility. Projects must be new and started during the hackathon. Everything you build stays open and reusable.