One of the goals of the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence has always been to inspire young people not only to study AI, but also to build with it.

This month, the International Board of IOAI published an official endorsement of LateranAI, a company co-founded by Wang Zerui, who represented Singapore at the first IOAI in Burgas in 2024 and won a Gold Medal, before returning in 2025 to earn Silver.

For the Board, Zerui’s journey reflects exactly what the Olympiad hopes to encourage: taking the knowledge and experience gained through competition and applying it to solve real-world problems.

Supporting fair competitions

As international competitions continue to grow, so does the challenge of ensuring their integrity.

The Board notes that with 131 accredited countries and territories and almost 500 contestants expected at IOAI 2026 in Astana, investigating potential violations becomes increasingly demanding. While human invigilators remain essential, they cannot observe every action taking place on every contestant’s screen.

LateranAI addresses this challenge by recording competition sessions and analysing screen activity and input events. Rather than replacing human reviewers, the system highlights moments that deserve attention, leaving every final decision to competition officials. Each flagged event can be reviewed together with the supporting evidence and replayed afterwards if necessary.

Tested in real competitions

According to the Board, the platform has already been deployed across more than 2,000 students in ten competition rounds.

The endorsement describes its use during the USA–North America AI Olympiad and the USA Cybersecurity Olympiad, where the system detected several forms of misconduct that had not been noticed during in-person invigilation, including the use of AI assistants embedded in permitted websites, automated scripts calling external AI services, remote keyboard control, and prohibited coding assistants.

The Board also highlights that the platform allows organizers to determine which types of data are collected, supports hosting data within national or regional jurisdictions, and follows the principles of GDPR and Singapore’s PDPA.

An endorsement from the IOAI Board

Following its review, the International Board recommends that national delegations and future host committees evaluate LateranAI for use in their own competitions and selection rounds.

The letter also notes that the USA–North America AI Olympiad and the USA Cybersecurity Olympiad will continue using the platform in 2027. In addition, IOAI will introduce the team to the organisers of IOAI 2027 in Singapore, while the Asian-Pacific Olympiad in AI is already discussing future cooperation with LateranAI.

For the IOAI community, however, the endorsement is about more than a piece of software.

It is also a story about one of its own alumni—someone who moved from competing at the Olympiad to building technology that may help future competitions become even fairer. As the Board concludes in its letter, this is exactly the kind of impact it hopes IOAI participants will have long after the medals are awarded.