European Diplomacy And Data Hackathon
September 21-22, 2026
In collaboration with the European External Action Service (EEAS) and the AI@EU MFA network, we organized a Hackathon in Berlin. For the first time, data experts from European Ministries of Foreign Affairs came together in this format to jointly develop solutions, exchange experiences, and learn from each other's approaches. The use case chosen was climate negotiations.
Diplomatic negotiations remain one of the least digitized areas of government work. At a COP, delegations work with tens of thousands of documents: party submissions, draft negotiating texts, decisions from previous COPs and national climate policies. In the preparation phase, and even more so during a running conference, there is little time to read them all. Participants were challenged to explore where AI and data-driven tools can provide meaningful support to negotiators, working on a shared archive of more than 24,000 documents from the UNFCCC and Climate Policy Radar.
Congratulations to the developer team of the "COP Analysis" prototype for winning the Hackathon! Their tool makes thirty years of climate negotiations comparable. It analyses more than 900 COP, CMP and CMA decisions sentence by sentence, shows which topics shaped each COP and how binding the language on each topic is, and traces when key concepts entered the negotiations. All results are reproducible and traceable down to the individual sentence.
Over the course of two days, the event combined two tracks. In the Tech Track, interdisciplinary teams designed and prototyped four solutions: a live negotiation assistant that tracks changes between draft texts and checks them against a delegation's red lines, a tool that prepares briefings for bilateral talks, an analysis of thirty years of COP decisions, and a chatbot that answers questions with sources cited. In parallel, the Policy Track brought together diplomats and policy experts to discuss AI and AI agents, AI in consular affairs, international AI governance, and Europe's technological capabilities. Teams developed together in a shared European environment on PLAIN, and the resulting code remains available for reuse.
Beyond the winning team, all groups demonstrated how data and AI can address concrete challenges in climate diplomacy, from tracking negotiation texts to preparing bilateral talks. The prototypes are exploratory, and moving them into actual negotiation practice will require further analysis and structured implementation. The Hackathon showed that collaboration across European MFAs can turn shared challenges into practical, innovative solutions.