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OpenAI Launches Global 'Build Week' With Codex Ambassadors, $100,000 Hackathon Across 50+ Cities

July 20, 2026 at 17:37 EDT

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Software Dev & Coding
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OpenAI has kicked off a worldwide "Build Week," a community-driven series of workshops, meetups and hackathons led by its Codex Ambassadors, paired with a $100,000 online challenge inviting developers everywhere to build projects using Codex and GPT-5.6.

July 13 – Aug 12 · OpenAI Build Week

OpenAI Sends Codex Global With a $100K Build Week

A worldwide series of ambassador-led workshops across 50+ cities, paired with an online challenge inviting developers to build with Codex and GPT-5.6 — part marketing showcase, part large-scale usage experiment.

$100K

Total prize pool across four tracks

50+

Cities hosting 60+ events

~44,963

Participants registered on the challenge

Competition tracks

Prize per track

Same reward structure repeated across all four tracks

$15,000

1st place

$10,000

2nd place

Plus OpenAI credits · DevDay/Exchange passes (~$650/person) · a 1-year Pro account · promo support · and a meeting with the Codex team.

The timeline

Jul 13

Challenge opens

Jul 21

Submissions due, 5:00 PM PT

Jul 22 – Aug 7

Judging window

Aug 12

Winners announced

What developers liked

Ideas turned into working implementations fast; hands-on orchestration of agents with /goal, Skills and worktrees, and a wide diversity of use cases across submissions.

The friction

Documentation struggled to keep pace, lending a stress-test feel — and while no experience is required, familiarity with the GPT-5.6 integration clearly helped.

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