Entente Cordiale Challenge 2026-2027

The 2026/2027 Challenge moves away from abstract definitions of AI. We treat Artificial Intelligence not as a neutral software tool, but as a lever of power that carries profound ethical consequences. Submissions must not simply describe an AI technology; they must identify a specific locus of power it alters and propose a concrete technical, regulatory, or governance framework to ethically manage that shift.

Artificial Intelligence: all computational models and technologies that are able to do tasks usually associated with human intelligence. This encompasses both machine learning and non-learning algorithms - consider a wider range of applications than the recent arrival of large language models (LLMs).

Technical submissions proposing engineering architectures, algorithmic designs, or scientific frameworks are as central to this challenge as policy or legal proposals. Furthermore, we actively seek submissions that propose viable business models, market incentives, or corporate governance structures that align profitability with ethical AI deployment. The competition does not privilege one mode of solution over another.

Power: the capacity to direct, control, or influence the behaviour of actors or the allocation of resources. This includes sovereign power (state surveillance, defence, border control), market power (monopolies, labour displacement, data harvesting), and discursive power (control over information ecosystems, epistemic trust, and public narrative). In a commercial context, this includes supply chain dominance, computational monopolies, algorithmic pricing control, and the power to dictate industry standards.

Ethics: this moves beyond vague notions of “fairness”. It requires addressing specific structural harms: for example, accountability vacuums in autonomous decision-making, the amplification of systemic biases, the erosion of cognitive liberty, resource extraction, or the tension between national security imperatives and individual human rights. Submissions should consider how these ethical principles can be operationalized within corporate governance structures, product lifecycles, and engineering pipelines.

To ensure reports are solution-focused, teams must anchor their analysis within one of the following operational tracks. Example problem statements are provided - participants are encouraged to write their own to suit the topic they choose to tackle.

Track A: Sovereign Power & Geopolitical Security

This track addresses how states and defense contractors deploy AI to project power, secure critical infrastructure, or maintain domestic order, and the technical and ethical guardrails required to prevent systemic overreach.

Example problem statements:

• How can democratic nations build accountability structures for the deployment of predictive AI in law enforcement and state surveillance without entirely halting technological efficacy?
• What international governance or non-proliferation frameworks can realistically regulate the development and deployment of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) given current geopolitical fragmentation?
• Propose an engineering architecture and procurement framework for integrating predictive AI into national grid defences, that preserve human oversight while maintaining millisecond response times.

Track B: Market Consolidation & Labor Autonomy

This track investigates the shifting power dynamics driven by hyper-consolidated technology sectors, the business models that sustain them (e.g., compute-as-a-service, data scraping), and their impact on global labor markets.

Example problem statements:

• As frontier AI models increasingly centralise economic power within a handful of multinational firms, what regulatory mechanisms (e.g., antitrust, public compute infrastructure) can states deploy to protect digital sovereignty and public interest?
• Design a viable corporate accountability framework or legislative policy that mitigates the displacement of knowledge-workers while protecting worker data privacy from invasive algorithmic management.
• Develop a business model and technical roadmap for a “public compute infrastructure” that allows mid-sized enterprises to compete with tech monopolies without compromising proprietary data privacy.

Track C: Information Integrity & Algorithmic Liability

This track targets the business models and algorithms that drive the information economy, focusing on the erosion of shared reality and the technical/regulatory mechanisms needed to assign liability and restore trust.

Example problem statements:

• Propose a scalable, technically feasible solution (e.g., cryptographic watermarking, decentralised verification protocols) to combat state-sponsored AI disinformation campaigns while strictly protecting online freedom of speech.
• How should legal systems assign liability for structural ethical harms (such as algorithmic radicalisation or algorithmic price-fixing) when the underlying system operates as an uninterpretable “black box”?
• Design a commercial framework and cryptographic verification standard (e.g., decentralized watermarking) that major social platforms could adopt to monetize 'verified synthetic media' while penalizing malicious deepfakes.

Track D: Independent Focus

Teams may define their own specific intersection of AI, Power, and Ethics outside of Tracks A, B, and C. However, the report must still target a specific, identifiable power imbalance caused by AI, and propose a concrete, actionable framework to resolve it. Broad, theoretical overviews will not score highly.

• Each team must comprise exactly three students. Individual submissions are not permitted.
• All members must be currently enrolled at an accredited higher education institution in the UK, France, or the US, and may be of any nationality.
• Undergraduate, Master's, and Doctoral students are all eligible, and a team may mix degree levels, faculties, or universities, provided all members are enrolled in the same
• Students who have deferred or interrupted their studies for up to six months remain
• Recent graduates, visiting scholars, and students whose graduation date falls before April 2027 are not eligible.

The organisers reserve the right to close registration early in the event of exceptionally high demand, or to extend the registration deadline if needed.

Although you submit your project directly to the Entente Cordiale-Challenge -- and we do not act as gate-keepers, we request that you also notify us about your project, submitting your team and topic before submitting it to the Challenge.

We are then able to follow your progress and offer support and guidance as you work on your paper. 

 P 

Each team completes a short online form, providing each member's full name, course, level of study, department or institution, and institutional email, along with a preliminary report title, keywords (at least three) and outline. The outline should set out:

• The research problem and motivation for the work
• Background and related work
• The novelty of the research
• The intended research approach
• Potential results

You may revise your title, outline, up to 80% of your keywords or registered team names at any time up to the Registration Amendments Deadline (December 2026). Amendments cannot be accepted after this date.

If your details are valid and your title and outline are relevant to the theme, you will receive a confirmation email and a unique Team ID, which you should keep for all future correspondence.

No. You must submit a paper as part of a team of three.

If you have an idea but don't know of potential teammates, talk to a faculty member or advisor to see if they know of other students. You could also email us to see if we've heard of others with similar interests who are also looking for partners.  

We can't guarantee you will find teammates, but we'll try to be helpful in the search. 

Send an email to [[international,Reves Center]]

Analysing a problem is not sufficient on its own: your report must also propose a solution that is feasible, original, and clearly responsive to a problem you have identified, while engaging with all three components of the theme.

Although this is a Franco-British-American competition, your solution does not need to be limited to those three countries; you are welcome to apply your ideas to any country or region, provided your reasoning is well-articulated and contextually appropriate.

A feasible solution is one that could, in principle, be implemented. Ambitious or transformative proposals are welcome, but you must show you have thought through how they could be carried out, by whom, and under what conditions, including:

• A clear plan or model showing how the solution would be developed and executed
• Consideration of financial, logistical, technical, political, or cultural constraints
• An understanding of the stakeholders affected by or involved in the solution
• Potential challenges or risks, and how you would mitigate them

Originality means going beyond existing models rather than rehashing well-known solutions, whether through a novel practical intervention, firsthand research (interviews, fieldwork, surveys), or a theoretical or conceptual contribution that meaningfully advances the debate. Challenging the assumptions behind the theme itself is welcome, provided your argument is well-substantiated.

You can view the winners from last year in a pdf.

Reports must be written in English or French (allowed only for teams in France).

Submit as a single PDF, double-spaced, font size 11 or 12, with margins of at least 5 cm on all sides.

Include page numbers on every page except the cover

Do not include your name or institution anywhere in the report; reports are marked

You may write in a formal academic register or a more reflective first-person style, provided the result is clear, professional, and well-referenced. A forward-looking, speculative approach is welcome where it is well-reasoned. If you use a significant number of specialist acronyms or non-English/French terms, consider including a short glossary in the appendices.

You can find awarded reports of the precedent editions online.

Use research methods appropriate to your discipline and justify your choice of methodology clearly in the report. Whatever approach you take, reflect critically on its limitations and how these may affect your findings.

If you plan to collect data from human participants (e.g., interviews or surveys), you must request ethical approval in advance, submitting a proposed interview schedule or survey, a draft information sheet, and a draft consent form before you begin data collection. An appropriate form and template will be disseminated following registration.

World limit

Reports must be between 3,000 and 5,000 words. This includes the main text, footnotes, endnotes, tables, figures, captions, and any table of contents. It excludes the cover page, appendices, and bibliography. Reports under 3,000 words and superior to 5,000 words will be penalised in marking, and content needed to assess your work should appear in the main body rather than an appendix or footnote.

Cover page

Your cover page must include only: (1) the total word count, (2) the name and logo of the competition, (3) the 2026/2027 theme, (4) a clear, concise report title, and (5) an acknowledgement of any external support received, where applicable. It must not contain anything that could identify your team or institution, and is not included in the word count.

Third-party images and copyright

Any images you include must be properly credited, and either licensed for reuse (for example under a Creative Commons 4.0 licence) or used with the explicit written permission of the copyright holder. This applies to all visual content: photographs, illustrations, diagrams, and charts. Do not include copyrighted material without clear, documented consent from its owner

— reports containing unauthorised images may have the offending material removed prior to publication, or be disqualified. If in doubt, use original visuals or images from reputable open-source platforms that clearly state their usage rights.

Referencing

There is no single referencing style mandated by the Challenge. Choose whichever convention is standard in your discipline (for example APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver, or OSCOLA), and apply it consistently with a complete bibliography. In general, you may either:

• Use full references in footnotes or endnotes, numbered serially, with a complete alphabetised bibliography; or
• Use an author-date (“Harvard-style”) system, with brief in-text citations and a complete alphabetised reference list at the end.

Note that footnote and endnote text counts toward your word limit, while a bibliography at the end of the report does not (this is one reason teams often prefer the author-date system).

Appendices and supplementary materials

You may include appendices or supplementary materials (e.g., survey results, technical schematics) to support your submission, and may embed hyperlinks to external sources such as interactive maps or tools, provided all links are functional and publicly accessible.

Academic integrity

All submitted work must be original. Academic misconduct — including plagiarism, collusion, contract cheating, and data fabrication — will be investigated and may result in your report being suspended from consideration.

Authors must write all text themselves. Using generative AI tools (such as ChatGPT or other LLMs) to produce text, images, or data is a form of academic misconduct unless you have informed the EC Day Board of this use in advance and disclosed it transparently within the report. Grammar-checking tools (e.g., Grammarly) and citation managers (e.g., Zotero) are permitted without disclosure.

Submit your report as a PDF, titled with your Team ID, through the official submission form as soon as it is ready — early submission is encouraged in case of technical issues. Once submitted, your report is final: it cannot be amended, and any further submissions will be discarded.

If extenuating circumstances mean you need an extension, email academics@ententecordialeday.org before the deadline with written supporting evidence (e.g., medical confirmation). Approved extensions still carry a points penalty; see the Point Penalties appendix for details.

Inspired by the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence and to celebrate the pivotal role played by France in America’s fight for freedom, the Entente Cordiale University Challenge opened their platform to a select group of leading American universities to reinforce the Challenge’s transatlantic, historical and global dimension in its mission of academic excellence, civic education and the transmission of shared heritage.

Their purpose is also to show how alliance, sacrifice, diplomacy and shared purpose helped shape America’s birth and the Declaration of Independence itself—lessons that remain essential at a time of profound global uncertainty.

William & Mary will join George Washington University, the University of Virginia, Lafayette College, Columbia University and the University of Alabama as partner universities in the 2026-2027 challenge.

Participating British and French universities include the London School of Economics and Political Science, King’s College London, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Sorbonne University, École Polytechnique, and Sciences Po Paris.

Groups of three students, of any nationality, discipline or level of study can register their team. Registered teams will have until January to research, draft, and submit a report on this year's theme, "Artificial Intelligence, Power, and Ethics." The top ten submissions from each country will be announced in February, and the finalists will be invited to present their work before an international Grand Jury at the 2027 Entente Cordiale Day Summit, taking place on April 7-8.

We will post detailed information and guidance in September. If you have questions before then, you can email kjhoving@wm.edu.