Global AI challenge to transform investigative journalism : For Journalists

https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2026/05/artificial-intelligence-investigative-journalism?fju003d1

Publish Date: 2026-05-13 18:06:00

Journalists and technologists invited to build AI agents to make investigations faster, more transparent and scalable

EVANSTON, Ill. –– Investigative journalists often obtain thousands, if not millions of pages of documents and take on the challenge of finding the truth buried inside. That could take months, or even years, of work to accomplish. Artificial intelligence can help, but many AI tools still have shortcomings.
Now, a new contest led by the Generative AI + Journalism Initiative at Northwestern University is working to unlock the potential of coding agents to increase the processing power of AI. The goal is to help investigative journalists work faster, more efficiently and smarter. The contest launches Friday, May 15 and ends July 15.

The Agentic AI Investigative Journalism Challenge is a global competition inviting journalists, data scientists, developers and technologists to build AI “agent skills,” or bundles of instructions and code, to help make investigative reporting faster, cheaper and more transparent.

“We don’t want to replace investigative journalists,” said Nick Diakopoulos, professor in communication studies and computer science. Diakopoulos leads the Computational Journalism Lab in Northwestern’s School of Communication. “The idea is to unlock the potential of these agents to support investigative journalists — to suggest leads, patterns and connections that are apparent in the documents.”

Using Claude AI to find newsworthy insights in a provided dataset comprised of U.S. House and Senate lobbying disclosures and congressional press releases from 2022 through March 2026, competing teams will enter their process as a replicable workflow.