UCL student Ilham Wicaksono wins $50,000 reward at global OpenAI hackathon with Holistic AI

UCL student Ilham Wicaksono, MSc AI for Sustainable Development, has won a prize at a global hackathon hosted by OpenAI on its new open-source model GPT-OSS-20.

The project, which formed Wicaksono’s thesis - Mind the Gap: Comparing Model- vs Agentic-Level Red Teaming with Action Graph - was developed in collaboration with Holistic AI, a London based company founded by UCL Computer Science alumni.

The team received a $50,000 award, following more than 600 submissions. The entry identifies a “security gap” where traditional model-level red teaming fails to expose vulnerabilities in autonomous LLM agents and demonstrates how “agentic level” attacks can bypass standard safety mechanisms.

The judges said the work was “an exceptionally rigorous and thorough investigation of jailbreaking, through a well-structured framework.”

“Holistic AI acted as technical supervisor, providing valuable feedback and discussion on my work with their expertise in AI governance, safety, and audit,” Wicaksono explained. 

“It was humbling to see how fast the AI safety landscape is changing, and that it is crucial to address it as a multidisciplinary problem requiring collaboration of research, engineering, and governance/policy expertise.”