The Codegate Security Forum will hold “Codegate 2026”, an international hacking defence contest and global conference, on July 23 to 24 at the COEX Grand Ballroom in Seoul.

The event is held under the theme, “The Path Toward a Top 3 Global AI Power: Security.”

A head-to-head hacking showdown between humans and AI is scheduled, drawing attention.

An “AI hacker” jointly developed by the Codegate Forum and KAIST will take part in the hacking defence contest finals as an actual competitor. For the first time in South Korea, human white hackers and AI will go head-to-head by searching for vulnerabilities in the same problems.

A total of 3,333 people from 88 countries are taking part in this year’s finals. They advanced through the qualifying round, which marked the largest scale in the past three years. The finals are split into a general division that runs for 24 hours and a junior division that runs for 12 hours. The contest uses a Jeopardy-style format in which participants solve problems to obtain “flags”. Total prize money is 71 million won. The winning team in the general division receives 50 million won and an automatic berth in next year’s finals.

A conference featuring domestic and foreign experts will be held on July 24. The keynote speech will be delivered by Kim Tae-soo (김태수), a Microsoft vice president for security research and a global scholar in the AI security field.

Kim led “Team Atlanta”, which took first place in the final round of the “AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC)” hosted by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In the lecture, he is set to unveil the winning strategy and future technical challenges, including automatically detecting and patching vulnerabilities in large-scale open-source software by combining large language models with traditional program analysis techniques.

Other speakers include Michael Gronager, co-founder of global blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis and head of Gry AI, and Lewis Lau, global head of communications for Huawei’s cybersecurity and privacy division. In an open-talk session chaired by KAIST professor Kim Yong-dae, domestic and foreign experts will gather for an all-out discussion on “cybersecurity in the AI era.”

A top-tier hands-on security training course previously available only at U.S. events Def Con and Black Hat will also run from July 21 to 23.

An “AI startup hackathon”, co-hosted by the Codegate Security Forum and the Korea Technology Finance Corp and sponsored by Hancom Group, will be held for the first time this year. With total prize money of 25 million won, it evaluates the real-world commercialisation potential and security of services based on AI technology.

Starting with this year’s event, Codegate will move to build an education ecosystem to nurture security talent in the AI era. It will select future talent and provide systematic educational opportunities, while running a practice-oriented curriculum with working white hackers participating as mentors.

Cho Hyun-sook (조현숙), chair of the Codegate Security Forum, said, “As AI joins the boundary between finding vulnerabilities and building defensive walls, the security paradigm is being completely upended.” She said, “Without a national defence system capable of blocking advanced offensive AI, it is impossible to leap into becoming an AI powerhouse, so this contest will be a place to diagnose the current state of AI security and present a clear milestone for South Korea’s path forward.”