About the challenge

The Y-Claude Hackathon is a 7-hour event where teams use Anthropic’s Claude AI tools to tackle real-world business problems. Hosted by Rice Claude Builder Club and sponsored by Anthropic, this hackathon brings together Rice students from all backgrounds to design fast, creative, and functional AI-powered solutions that demonstrate how Claude can drive innovation.

Over the weekend, you’ll brainstorm, prototype, and pitch your solution to be evaluated for three tracks: 

Track 1: Innovate

Develop a novel business idea that disrupts existing markets or creates entirely new opportunities. Focus on originality, scalability, and real-world impact.

Track 2: Optimize

Identify a process and design a solution that significantly improves speed, cost, or performance. Your goal is to make something meaningfully faster, cheaper, or more effective.

Track 3: Predict

Build a model that predicts future outcomes using data and patterns. This could range from market trends to everyday behaviors.

Every submission will be reviewed for each track, and the project best fitting each track (without overlap) will be selected. 

Get Started

1. Form a team (3–4 people recommended, but solo participants are welcome).

2. Choose a problem to solve, optionally aligned with one of the tracks.

3. Use Claude AI to design, build, and refine your solution.

4. Submit your project on Devpost before judging begins on Saturday, April 4 at 4:30 PM.

• Impact and Relevance
  Tackles a clear, high-impact need through: a novel opportunity (Innovate), a measurable improvement (Optimize), or an actionable prediction (Predict)
• Creativity
  Highly innovative and demonstrates fresh, original thinking
• Technical Execution
  Robust, well-built solution showing strong technical skill and attention to detail
• Best Use of Claude (Bonus)
  Claude is integrated thoughtfully to enhance your project’s functionality or user experience.