DebateSim won second place at the AI4Legislation 2025 competition, run by the Silicon Valley Chinese Association Foundation (SVCAF). The prize was $2,000. I co-founded DebateSim with Alex Liao, and we led the team together with Mrinal Agarwal, alongside Shely Jain and Sanjana Gowda. All of us are from Emerald High School.
What DebateSim is
DebateSim is a website where you can debate real legislation with an AI, or watch two AIs debate each other. You can try it at debatesim.us.
The idea came from a problem we all ran into as students. Bills are long and hard to read, and practicing debate usually needs a partner, a judge, and a free afternoon. We wanted something you could open at any time, pick a real bill, and start arguing.
How it works
The platform pulls real bills from Congress.gov for federal legislation and from LegiScan for all 50 states. It can read a bill that runs past 40,000 characters, pull out the sections that matter, and grade the bill on six criteria such as economic impact, public benefit, and constitutional concerns.
From there you pick a mode:
- AI vs AI: watch both sides of a bill argued out.
- AI vs User: practice against an AI opponent.
- User vs User: debate another person, with the AI as the judge.
After a round, an AI judge gives feedback and explains who won and why. You can also speak your arguments instead of typing them.
Under the hood it is a React frontend and a FastAPI backend. We route requests through OpenRouter, which gives the platform access to 100+ language models, so a debate can switch between models and fall back to another one if the first fails.
My role
I led the frontend and built the connection between the client and the backend API. I also ran penetration tests against the platform, looking for the kinds of security problems that are specific to AI models.
That work taught me a lot about managing state in a frontend, about talking to a backend securely, and about how different AI security is from ordinary web security. A model can be talked into things that a normal API never could.
What I took from it
AI4Legislation is about using AI to help people take part in the legislative process, so DebateSim fit the theme well. What I like most about it is that it uses real, current bills. A debate about a made-up topic is practice. A debate about a bill that is in front of Congress right now teaches you something about your own government.
We have kept building on DebateSim since.
Thanks to Alex, Mrinal, Shely, and Sanjana, and to SVCAF for running the competition.