For NORA, the Nordic AI Cup represents another step in our ongoing efforts to strengthen the AI community through competitions that connect students, researchers and industry. The initiative originated in Denmark, where Ambolt AI launched the National Championship in AI in 2021. In 2025, NORA helped organise the first Norwegian AI Championship, building on the Danish experience. This year, the competition expanded to a Nordic format, with national competitions taking place in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
The winners from each country earned a place in the Nordic finale in Reykjavík, where they competed in a reinforcement learning challenge called Robot Robbers. Participants developed AI agents to steer five robbers through a city, collect cash bags and avoid the scrooges. With only one evaluation run, every decision mattered.
The final brought together five national winners: Ålle from Denmark, Brew&Booze from Sweden, Iftikhar Amiri from Norway, Hannah Family from Finland and Cybotrix from Iceland. After an exciting final, Hannah Family from Finland emerged as the winner of the Nordic AI Cup 2026, earning the title of Nordic AI Champion.
Reflecting on the experience, Norway's representative, Iftikhar Amiri, highlighted the challenges he enjoyed most, particularly the medical task, which he described as difficult but rewarding: “It was a difficult one, and therefore I liked it.” Albert Steenstrup from Denmark emphasised the experience of meeting fellow competitors, recalling “going to Iceland and meeting all of you guys, competing at late-night hours” as a favourite memory, while Team Iceland highlighted how lessons learned during the national competition helped them improve their approach to the Nordic final. Competition winner Yue Fang summed up his experiences like this:
“One of my biggest takeaways from the Nordic AI Cup is the importance of keeping humans in the loop. Even as AI agents become incredibly powerful, I am still amazed by the extraordinary power of human intuition and imagination. AI can explore possibilities and iterate at astonishing speed, but sometimes a single human insight can completely change the direction of a solution. To me, human-in-the-loop is not just about supervising AI, but about combining machine intelligence with human creativity and judgment. I believe that’s where the most exciting breakthroughs will come from.”
- Yue Fang, Winner of Nordic AI Cup 2026
Alongside the competition, NORA's CEO Michael Solvang sat down with the CEO of Ambolt AI, the organisation behind the original Danish AI Championship, for a conversation about the development of the Nordic AI Cup and the opportunities it creates for emerging AI talent. The discussion offered an opportunity to reflect on how a national initiative in Denmark has evolved into a competition spanning all five Nordic countries, and how such initiatives can contribute to a stronger and more connected Nordic AI community. It also highlighted the importance of collaboration between organisations across the region in creating opportunities for students to gain practical experience, challenge themselves, and building connections beyond national borders.
Beyond the competition, the Nordic AI Cup demonstrates the value of bringing together emerging talent from across the region. By creating opportunities for students to test their skills against challenging AI problems, NORA and its Nordic partners aim to strengthen collaboration, encourage knowledge sharing, and inspire the next generation of AI researchers and innovators.
Thank you to all the participants for joining - congratulations to the national champions from each country, and to Yue Fang for securing the Nordic prize!