Dhaka, 26 October 2026: Team zAI BD, led by artificial intelligence (AI) engineers from the Bangladesh Research and Education Network (BdREN), has been crowned champion of the United Nations Global Hackathon 2026, outperforming hundreds of teams from 37 countries. The team was announced as the winner at the grand finale held at the United Nations Conference Centre in Bangkok, Thailand, on 15 October 2026.

Organised by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), the competition, titled “United Nations Global Hackathon 2026: Using AI for Digital Trade Regulatory Analysis,” aimed to develop open-source AI solutions capable of analysing countries' digital trade laws and regulations in support of the UN's Regional Digital Trade Integration Index (RDTII).

Following a five-month selection process, Team zAI BD secured its place among the finalists in August. During the grand finale, participating teams underwent a live stress test involving an economy and a topic not disclosed in advance. Judges then tested the platforms and evaluated the teams' presentations and responses during question-and-answer sessions. Team zAI BD emerged as the overall champion.

The team developed ClauseChain, an open-source AI platform designed to analyse digital trade laws and regulations with a strong emphasis on accuracy, transparency, and verifiability. The platform collects legislation from official government portals and gazettes, processes scanned documents, and organises legal texts into sections and subsections. Its AI capabilities match individual legal provisions against the indicators of the RDTII.

A distinctive feature of ClauseChain is its comprehensive verification mechanism. Every AI-generated quotation is checked word for word against the original official document. The system also verifies whether legislation remains in force and whether its source is official. Any finding that fails one or more of nine automated checks is discarded. The platform further highlights the relevant passage on the original page of the legal document, enabling policymakers and researchers to verify the findings independently.

ClauseChain currently supports legal analysis across 11 economies: Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Mongolia, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, and Timor-Leste. The platform has processed more than 154,000 legal provisions from 746 laws and regulations collected from 1,049 official sources. It also supports multilingual legal analysis, presenting quotations in their original languages alongside English translations. The platform is fully open source.

BdREN played a significant role in enabling the team's achievement by providing access to an NVIDIA DGX Spark supercomputer installed at its data centre. Using this advanced computing infrastructure, the team ran its own large language model, text-analysis models, and optical character recognition (OCR) technology.

This enabled the team to conduct its analysis using computing resources within Bangladesh, without relying on foreign commercial AI services or incurring external API costs. The use of domestic AI computing infrastructure was an important consideration in the competition's evaluation. BdREN's support demonstrated how national research and education infrastructure can empower local innovators to develop advanced AI solutions for complex global challenges.

The winning team was led by Abu Naser Md Nafew, Manager (Innovation) and AI Engineer at BdREN. The other members were Punam Chowdhury, Senior Developer and AI Engineer at BdREN; Md Saniul Basir Saz, AI Engineer at BdREN; and Md Insaful Rahman Tusar, Legal Reviewer. The team also expressed its gratitude to Dr Mohammad Nowshin Amin Shaikh, Associate Professor at Jashore University of Science and Technology (JUST), for supervising its research.

Reflecting on the achievement, team leader Abu Naser Md Nafew said, “Our goal was to build a system where every piece of information can be verified all the way back to the original government document. The DGX Spark at BdREN’s data centre showed us that world-class AI can run on Bangladesh’s own infrastructure. This achievement belongs to all of Bangladesh.”

The hackathon involved several prominent international institutions and development partners, including the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang in Thailand, CMKL University, Singapore Management University, and the European University Institute, among others.

Following the victory, ESCAP's Trade Policy and Facilitation Section expressed interest in further developing ClauseChain and exploring its potential as a full-fledged product. This interest highlights the platform's potential to support evidence-based policymaking and improve the efficiency and reliability of digital trade regulatory analysis.

The achievement marks a significant milestone for Bangladesh's AI research and innovation ecosystem. It also highlights BdREN's contribution to advancing research and innovation by providing access to modern computing infrastructure and enabling local talent to develop globally competitive technologies. Team zAI BD's success demonstrates how Bangladesh's research capabilities can contribute to international innovation and deliver solutions with global impact.