Anthropic Opens Japan-Focused Claude Code Hackathon to 250 Applicants
Anthropic is putting API credits and its Claude Code tool behind projects from people outside professional engineering, and it plans to introduce the resulting developers and projects itself.
Reporting from 1 source: GameBusiness.jp.
Anthropic will run Built with Claude: Japan 2026, a fully online hackathon co-hosted with the AI community Cerebral Valley, from 12:00 on November 2 to 14:00 on November 10. Applications for Japan residents close at 23:59 on October 26, and 250 people who pass screening can join, alone or in teams of up to two. Participants build with Claude Code; each screened applicant gets the Max 5x Plan and $500 in Claude API credits, and winners share $50,000 in credits.
Screening is the gate. Every applicant who passes gets the Max 5x Plan and $500 in Claude API credits, so the cost of trying sits with Anthropic rather than the participant. Winners take a separate pool of $50,000 in Claude API credits, about 8 million yen.
The event page names two starting points for development: tools spun from a person's own expertise or daily inconvenience, and mechanisms that remove technical barriers to problems shared by Japanese society, such as the aging society and labor shortages. Anthropic also lists work efficiency tools, social issue solutions, and support tools for game production and creative work among the ideas it expects.
Teams are capped at two people, and each member applies and is screened separately. Judges will be announced later, and results are scheduled to be announced online on November 10.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.