The Bot Olympics: A $50K Industry Challenge to Confront the Threat of AI Agents in Online Research

AI gets better at mimicking human behavior every few months, creating a new challenge for survey researchers: any detection system that works today may not work tomorrow.

Rather than treating bot detection as a solved problem, CloudResearch and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched the Bot Olympics, a $50,000 open competition where AI agents attempt to bypass survey fraud defenses while researchers work to stop them.

This webinar takes you inside that process. You'll see what happens when modern AI is tested against leading detection systems, what those results reveal about current threats, and why continuous validation is becoming essential for protecting data quality.

You'll come away with a better understanding of the tools, signals, and practices researchers can use to safeguard survey data as AI capabilities continue to evolve.

What You'll Learn:

• What Bot Olympics detection data reveals about the differences between AI agents and human respondents.
• How a red-team vs. blue-team approach creates a continuously evolving defense against survey fraud.
• Why traditional data quality checks are no longer enough and what researchers can do to better protect their data.