Freedom for AI? Aaryan thinks through the big issues in acclaimed global competition entry

Year 10’s Aaryan Prabhaker entry to a Cambridge-based international essay competition saw him placed in the top 10% out of more 15,000 submissions worldwide.

He has now been invited to the Cambridge Re:think Essay Competition’s awards ceremony at King’s College, Cambridge, where the speaker will be Physics Nobel Laureate Dr Barry Barish.

Aaryan’s Honourable Mention for his essay comes just weeks after it was announced that he had won another global competition, the 2026 World Math Hackathon.

Head of Digital Teaching & Learning, Michael Noonan said: “It’s proving to be quite a year for Aaryan! Our congratulations go to him on this latest success.”

Aaryan’s entry in the 14-17 senior division of the competition explored the question Should AI systems be granted legal personhood, or are they tools that must always remain under human accountability?

There were prompts to help answer all the questions. For Aaryan’s chosen topic, these came from Dr Biswadeep Khan, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the US’s Stanford University. A recommended reading list was provided.

Mr Noonan added: “As AI continues to reshape society, this question sits at the heart of important ethical, legal, and technological debates. Aaryan’s essay is, thus, a very good and pertinent example of the free-thinking scholarship that we seek to encourage among our pupils.”

The competition is run by the Cambridge Centre for International Research, which was founded by a group of Cambridge graduates committed to making academic research more accessible to the public. Entries this year came from more than 50 countries.

The awarding of Aaryan’s Honourable mention followed four rigorous rounds of blind review conducted by scholars from Cambridge, Oxford, Stanford, MIT, and several Ivy League universities.

Aaryan, who has received a digital certificate, balances the time he spends on competition entries with his studies at QE and his love of cricket. He plays the piano and is a member of QE’s strings orchestra. He said: “You have to be organised and you have to have schedule to fit in the things that you are interested in.”