What's in it for you

This isn’t a gig, a freelance contract, or an investment in your startup. It’s a grant, pure and simple, to empower you to keep building on YOUR project.

Here’s exactly what you get if selected for the Impossible Benchmark Program:

• $30,000/year grant (paid quarterly, $7,500 per installment), renewable for up to 2 years, no equity taken, no strings attached beyond the program terms.

• Full ownership of your code: You retain all rights. We only ask for a time-bound, exclusive license to use your closed-source project to build AI benchmarks.

• Direct visibility with the world’s top AI labs (think for example OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, Mistral, ...). Your work becomes part of their frontier.

• Invitation to San Francisco (for top contributors): Meet researchers, share your workflow, and shape how AI learns to code like elite engineers, not just autocomplete.

• Zero pressure to “productize”: This isn’t about building a business. It’s about advancing hard, real-world engineering. If your project solves a meaningful problem and confuses AI, that’s enough.

• A community of peers: Join 100 of the world’s most technically rigorous builders—people who code in Rust, C++, Go, embedded systems, compilers, and other domains where correctness, context, and complexity matter more than syntax.

In short: You get paid to do what you’re already passionate about, while teaching AI where it still falls short.