Key Upcoming 2026 CTF Events:

• UofTCTF 2026: Online, January 9-11, 2026 (Jeopardy-style).
• Wiz Capture the Flag: Delhi, India, January 22, 2026 (Roadshow event).
• K12 SIX Conference CTF: Albuquerque, NM, February 24-26, 2026 (For K-12 sector).
• iCTF 2026: March 9-13, 2026 (International, organized by Shellphish).
• Wicked6 2026: March 27-29, 2026 (Global Women’s Cyber League).
• WUST CTF: April 6, 2026 (Onsite at Washington University of Science and Technology).
• BearcatCTF: University of Cincinnati (In-person/Online for Ohio/KY/IN students).
• TexSAW 2026: University of Texas at Dallas (International, all skill levels).
• UACTF 2026: University of Alabama (For middle & high school students).
• MITRE eCTF: Semester-long (Registration open until Jan 31, 2026). 

• CTFtime.org: The central hub for CTF listings, calendars, and teams.
• University Websites: Many universities (like UofT, UofA, UC) host annual CTFs.
• Specialized Platforms: Look for events by organizations like WiCyS (Women in Cybersecurity) or sector-specific groups. 

McLean, Va., and Bedford, Mass., September 24, 2025 – MITRE announces that registration is now open for the 2026 Embedded Capture the Flag (eCTFTM) Competition, a semester-long program designed for high school and college students to develop practical cybersecurity skills and strengthen the nation’s technical workforce.

Registration is open until January 31, 2026. The competition begins January 14 and runs through April 15, with an award ceremony on April 24, 2026.

Now in its 11th year, the MITRE eCTF provides hands-on experience in securing embedded systems—essential components in modern technology. The competition brings together students from universities, high schools, and community colleges worldwide, enabling them to build both offensive and defensive cybersecurity skills needed for future careers.

“MITRE’s focus on real-world scenarios, hands-on learning, and team collaboration ensures participants gain foundational skills to protect critical infrastructure,” said Doug Robbins, vice president, engineering and prototyping, MITRE. “By offering access to advanced hardware platforms, secure environments, and expert mentorship, MITRE supports students in developing the expertise required for technical careers.”

2026 Competition Theme: Securing Chip Foundries

This year, teams will design and implement a secure storage solution for a chip foundry. Participants must build systems that allow users with different roles to access appropriate data, while preventing unauthorized access to sensitive chip designs. This scenario reflects the complex security challenges faced by industry and government, giving participants experience in protecting mission-critical technology.

The 2026 eCTF introduces a new hardware platform—the Texas Instruments MSPM0L2228, featuring a Cortex-M0+ ARM processor, 256 kB of flash, 32 kB of static random-access memory, and multiple peripherals. Teams will use a custom board, with the option to purchase additional LP-MSPM0L2228 LaunchPads to support development.

More information, including registration details, is available at https://ectf.mitre.org. Questions can be directed to ectf@mitre.org. Companies interested in supporting the eCTF can learn more at https://ectf.mitre.org/sponsor. MITRE recommends that participating schools offer course credit to students, reinforcing the competition’s role in workforce preparation.

2025 turned out pretty much as I anticipated. What comes next?

AGI didn’t materialize (contra predictions from Elon Musk and others); GPT-5 was underwhelming, and didn’t solve hallucinations. LLMs still aren’t reliable; the economics look dubious. Few AI companies aside from Nvidia are making a profit, and nobody has much of a technical moat. OpenAI has lost a lot of its lead. Many would agree we have reached a point of diminishing returns for scaling; faith in scaling as a route to AGI has dissipated. Neurosymbolic AI (a hybrid of neural networks and classical approaches) is starting to rise. No system solved more than 4 (or maybe any) of the Marcus-Brundage tasks. Despite all the hype, agents didn’t turn out to be reliable. Overall, by my count, sixteen of my seventeen “high confidence” predictions about 2025 proved to be correct.

Here are six or seven predictions for 2026; the first is a holdover from last year that no longer will surprise many people.

1. We won’t get to AGI in 2026 (or 7). At this point I doubt many people would publicly disagree, but just a few months ago the world was rather different. Astonishing how much the vibe has shifted in just a few months, especially with people like Sutskever and Sutton coming out with their own concerns.
2. Human domestic robots like Optimus and Figure will be all demo and very little product. Reviews by Joanna Stern and Marques Brownle of one early prototype were damning; there will be tons of lab demos but getting these robots to work in people’s homes will be very very hard, as Rodney Brooks has said many times.
3. No country will take a decisive lead in the GenAI “race”.
4. Work on new approaches such as world models and neurosymbolic will escalate.
5. 2025 will be known as the year of the peak bubble, and also the moment at which Wall Street began to lose confidence in generative AI. Valuations may go up before they fall, but the Oracle craze early in September and what has happened since will in hindsight be seen as the beginning of the end.
6. Backlash to Generative AI and radical deregulation will escalate. In the midterms, AI will be an election issue for first time. Trump may eventually distance himself from AI because of this backlash.

And lastly, the seventh: a metaprediction, which is a prediction about predictions. I don’t expect my predictions to be as on target this year as last, for a happy reason: across the field, the intellectual situation has gone from one that was stagnant (all LLMs all the time) and unrealistic (“AGI is nigh”) to one that is more fluid, more realistic, and more open-minded. If anything would lead to genuine progress, it would be that.