Puzzle Safari 2026 AI Policy

The capabilities of AI tools have hugely increased in the past few years. This poses the risk of substantially degrading the Puzzle Safari experience for everyone. Puzzle Safari is a puzzle-solving event, not an AI prompting event or a coding event. When you ask an AI tool or agent to solve large parts of a puzzle, we feel you are losing the spirit of the event, and most likely losing the fun. We want you to spend the day thinking creatively, engaging with your teammates, and fully participating in something you can only do once a year. Because Puzzle Safari is in part a competition, and fair competitions require rules that everyone follows equally, we are restricting the use of AI tools during Puzzle Safari.

What is Allowed

During Puzzle Safari, you can use the internet, and specifically text-based search engines, as a tool while solving puzzles:

• Text-based searches are okay, limited to a reasonable amount of text (no copy-paste of datasets into text searches). Search engines may end up using AI for text-based searches and the results may come back with “AI-Enhanced” results. You can use these results, but you should not then start a chatbot conversation to further refine or explain them, even if the search engine website offers that option. Don’t use the “AI Mode” (Google) or “Copilot” (Bing) buttons.
• Visiting websites for information that may help solve a puzzle is okay: Wikipedia pages, Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB), crossword clue databases, celebrity photos, history of book production in the middle ages, etc.
• Applications or websites that search English language dictionaries, such as LeXpert, TEA, WordMan, Andy’s Anagrams, etc. are allowed. Home written applications that do the same are allowed if they don’t use an AI model at runtime.
• Although it may seem slightly inconsistent, music recognition apps like Shazam are allowed (as they have been in previous years).

What is Restricted

Our AI policy restricts using AI for most things:

• No interacting with AI apps or equivalent websites like Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Siri, Alexa, Grok, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, etc.
• No explicit use of AI that’s integrated into apps, like Copilot in Microsoft Office, Gemini in Google Workspace, etc.
• You may not use the “AI Mode” button on the main Google site, or the “Copilot” button on the Bing site. These are just shortcuts for Gemini or Copilot, and are thus out of bounds.
• No talking/typing with chatbots, no matter where they might be.
• No coding AI or coding agents. If you want to write code during the event to help solve a puzzle, you must write the c ode without the use of AI. (You can use coding AI before the event to help you write a general tool.)
• No tools that you have written that make use of AI models or agents during the event, regardless of whether the AI is running locally or in the cloud.
• No reverse image search (submitting images to search engines or AI tools) of puzzle elements, including partial images from puzzles or full puzzle PDFs. This restriction includes Google and Bing reverse image search and similar tools.
• No AI dataset searches, such as providing a search engine with a data source (either directly or indirectly with a URL) and specifying search criteria against that dataset.
• No testing partial results with AI apps, tools, chatbots, or agents, even just to check something.

If there is a tool you want to use but it might be considered AI, our suggestion is don’t use it! If you really have a question a bout whether a tool is allowed or not, please ask (ideally well before the event).

Besides publishing this document, there is little that we can do to prevent you from using AI. Just as we ask you to be on your honor to have only 4 people on your team, we are asking you not to use AI to solve puzzles. We realize not everyone will agree with where we have drawn the line, but we sincerely hope that you will agree to abide by the line we have drawn.