Minds by Animoca Brands Corporation Ltd (Unlisted (AU):AB1) has teamed up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to launch the AWS Agentic Football Cup – Virtual League, a global competition designed to give participants hands-on experience building and managing teams of artificial intelligence agents.
The inaugural Alpha Season will begin on September 11, with participants competing for the chance to attend the finals at AWS re in Las Vegas and share in a US$50,000 prize pool.
Registration is free and no coding experience is required.
AI agents take to the football pitch
Participants will build and coach teams of five AI agents that compete in simulated football matches, with tactics and behaviours defined using natural-language instructions.
Each entrant will also receive an Assistant Coach Mind to help develop team strategy throughout the competition.
The tournament is intended to demonstrate how autonomous AI agents can be directed and coordinated, allowing users to experiment with prompting, role design, decision-making and agent orchestration in a competitive environment.
Minds is Animoca Brands' persistent agentic AI platform, designed to allow users to deploy and direct always-on AI agents without operating their own servers or managing underlying software and hardware.
Las Vegas finals
The Alpha Season will run for seven weeks and include up to six leagues of as many as 2,000 teams each.
Teams will play 10 matches each week across Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with up to six league champions and four wildcard winners advancing to the finals.
The 10 finalists will compete at AWS re in Las Vegas between November 30 and December 4.
Finalists will receive travel support including flights and accommodation, US$500 and access to AWS re.
The overall champion will receive US$30,000, while the first and second runners-up will receive US$15,000 and US$5,000 respectively.
Building practical AI experience
Animoca Brands co-founder and executive chairman Yat Siu said the competition was designed to make agentic AI more approachable while giving users practical experience managing multiple autonomous agents.
“We built Minds by Animoca Brands to make personal AI agents accessible and easy in everyday life,” Siu said.
AWS vice president of agentic AI and emerging technologies Swami Sivasubramanian said practical experience was becoming increasingly important as agentic AI develops.
“We're at an inflection point for agentic AI, and it’s more important than ever for builders to get real, hands-on experience creating and orchestrating agents,” he said.
Registration for the AWS Agentic Football Cup – Virtual League is open now, with competition beginning on September 11.
