SAN FRANCISCO, CA, August 17, 2026 (EZ Newswire) -- The AI Collective, the largest nonprofit AI community in the world, today announced Hack for Humanity, a global civic hackathon running September 1 through October 31, 2026, across 120 chapters in 50 countries.
In June, communities in 30 countries gathered for Humans in AI Week to name the problems AI was creating in the places where they live. This fall, they start building.
The idea behind Hack for Humanity is simple: a conversation about whether AI serves humanity only goes so far. Eventually, someone has to sit down and build the version that does.
Public trust in AI remains fragile. As AI moves rapidly into workplaces, schools, governments, and everyday life, many of the decisions shaping that transformation are still being made far from the communities living with their consequences.
Hack for Humanity starts from a different premise: apply AI to the public good, and put the people closest to a problem in the room to help solve it.
"Technology should serve humanity, not the other way around," said AJ Green, President and Executive Director of The AI Collective. "The best thing our community can do is take our technical skills and point them at the places we actually live.”
Three themes surfaced repeatedly across communities in June: job displacement, technical literacy, and accessibility. Chapters will build around those themes while also setting challenges locally, based on the priorities of their own cities and communities. People who live with a problem often see things outsiders miss.
Hack for Humanity is deliberately built without a commercial outcome in mind. The AI Collective isn’t asking participants to promote a product, validate a company strategy, or build toward a specific answer. As a nonprofit, it can start with a simpler question: what problems are worth solving, and what can this many people actually do about them?
“We spend a lot of time talking about what AI might make possible. This is about finding out what people can actually build with it when you point that energy at problems that matter,” said Catherine McMillan, Chief Operating Officer of The AI Collective. “If, at the end of this, something exists that can genuinely help someone — and it didn’t exist before — that’s a meaningful outcome.”
Hack for Humanity is the culmination of Soul Summer, the global series of community programming that began with Humans in AI Week in June. That week brought together communities in 100 cities across 30 countries; this fall, 120 chapters across 50 countries will participate in Hack for Humanity, making it the largest coordinated civic build in The AI Collective’s history.
AI is lowering some of the barriers to knowledge, technical capability, and building things that once required significant capital or specialized teams. That creates an opportunity to broaden who gets to shape technology — and who gets to benefit from it.
But that outcome is not guaranteed. The question is not only what AI will make possible, but who gets to decide what gets built and which problems are worth solving.
In June, communities across The AI Collective started that conversation. This fall, they put those ideas to work.
Register now at www.aicollective.com/h4h
About The AI Collective
The AI Collective is a global nonprofit and the largest grassroots AI community in the world — 250,000+ members, 250+ chapters, 70+ countries, 2,800+ events hosted to date. AIC's mission: ensure the humanity and technology advance in harmony, so the most powerful technology in history serves all of us. For more information, visit www.aicollective.com.
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SOURCE: The AI Collective
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