Is your model a top model?

Policy submissions for the Nebius × Positronic Physical AI Competition are now open. Register early—the first 50 registered teams that make a submission in the first week get $100 in Nebius GPU credits.

We believe that open challenges lead to progress. They bring together the best minds and foster community. Open challenges with shared rules have marked turning points before. In the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge, no autonomous vehicle finished the course. A year later, five did. We want to do the same for robotic manipulation with the Nebius × Positronic Physical AI Competition.

At Positronic Robotics, we independently evaluate physical AI models to provide the data needed for continuous improvement, establishing an objective record of how these models execute commercially relevant tasks.

We originally launched our public leaderboard, PhAIL.ai, with Nebius as our Founding Partner—and are teaming up with them again to run a joint Physical AI Competition. The event is powered by Nebius’s high-performance GPU infrastructure and their Physical AI Workbench—the software ecosystem that turns foundational physical AI tools into headless, composable building blocks.

On the DROID: Everyday tasks board at PhAIL.ai, open models have run more than a thousand episodes across more than a hundred common tasks, all on the same Franka arm. Even the best of them completes only about 70% of tasks on average, and the weakest about 12%. Robotic manipulation is far from solved, and the gap between models is wide enough for a small team with a good idea to make a difference.

The Physical AI Competition runs from October to December 2026. We evaluate teams’ models first in simulation, and the top 10 advance to testing on a physical robot arm.

Compete for $20K+ in Nebius GPU credits and Positronic evaluation credits, engage with other researchers, and test your model in the real world!

Registration and full details: competition.phail.ai

Questions and discussion: Positronic Discord

May the best policy win!