Stringer Safety won a prize at the Human Rights Foundation's first AI Hack for Freedom hackathon, held at Bitcoin Park in Austin, Texas from January 17 to 18, 2026, with winners announced on January 21. The hackathon produced eight unique tools across competing teams and paired globally known dissidents with open-source developers on 28-hour builds.
The application is a safety tool for journalists working in high-risk environments. Reporters maintain a trusted contact network in the app, share periodic location and status updates with that network, and trigger a one-click SOS alert that surfaces context to those contacts and pulls response recommendations from the encrypted Maple AI assistant, itself a separate HRF grantee in the AI for Individual Rights program. The team has stated public plans to extend the application with end-to-end encrypted location sharing and messaging.
The team was captained by Anjan Sundaram, a journalist who has worked as a stringer for The New York Times and The Associated Press in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, won a Frontline Club award for war reporting from the Central African Republic, and authored three memoirs of journalism (Stringer, Bad News, and Breakup). Bad News, about the rise of dictatorship in Rwanda, drew threats severe enough to require protection from the New York Police Department and Scotland Yard. Sundaram also founded The Stringer Foundation to support frontline journalists, which makes the application a direct extension of the operational problem he has spent two decades inside.
Recipient
Anjan Sundaram et al. (AI Hack for Freedom)
Funder
Human Rights Foundation · foundation · Global
Funds open-source AI tools that put inference, agentic capability, and private compute into the hands of dissidents and civil society under authoritarian regimes.
Primary source
https://hrf.org/latest/announcing-the-ai-hack-for-freedom-hackathon-winners/
Additional sources
More from Human Rights Foundation
- Pathos 2026-01-18 · Hackathon prize
Application running on the decentralized Nostr protocol so it cannot be shut down by governments. Built at HRF's first AI Hack for Freedom in Austin, January 2026.
- Maple AI 2025-11-24 · Undisclosed
Open-source, end-to-end encrypted AI assistant built by OpenSecret using secure enclaves and confidential computing. Activists in authoritarian environments can use frontier LLMs without their queries being scanned, stored, or handed to governments. HRF support funds capability improvements and new features for activist research workflows.
- Routstr 2025-11-24 · Undisclosed
LLM routing marketplace built on the Nostr decentralized communications protocol. Users connect pseudonymously to buy and sell access to each other's AI accounts in an uncensorable peer-to-peer marketplace, giving activists inference even when governments or corporate providers block them.
- OpenCode 2025-11-24 · Undisclosed
Fully open-source agentic coding platform that runs entirely locally. Users can inspect every line of code, avoid surveillance, and build software without routing sensitive work through corporate infrastructure, making it usable for civil-society teams under authoritarian rule.
- PlebDevs AI Development Course 2025-11-24 · Undisclosed
Developer education platform focused on Bitcoin and open-source technology launching an AI development course for beginners building open-source AI tools in repressive environments.