Russian School Team Wins International AI Olympiad for Third Consecutive Year

The Russian school team became the absolute champion at the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence (IOAI) for the third consecutive year, held in Kazakhstan from August 2 to 7, 2026. The team won eight medals: seven golds and one bronze. Russia topped the standings, with China and Poland in second and third places. The team was trained by experts from the Central University and the Alliance in the Field of Artificial Intelligence. This year's competition featured a record 465 students from 105 countries, a 64% increase over last year, making IOAI the second largest international olympiad after the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). The final consisted of two six-hour individual rounds with three tasks each, covering audio processing, virtual robot control, semantic word search, adversarial attacks on computer vision models, detection of LLM-generated text, and generating logo variations. The gold medalists were Artem Gorokhov, Mikhail Vershinin, Elisey Kirpichenko, Kirill Labzin, Alexander Povarov, Nikita Pudovkin, and Semyon Rodionov; the bronze went to Alexey Kolegov. The team selection was based on the Northern Eurasia OAI 2026 (NEOAI) qualifying olympiad, followed by two months of intensive training. The Central University and the Alliance in AI will host the Asia-Pacific Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence (APOAI) in Russia in April 2027, marking the first time the event will be held offline.