The JARVIS Challenge — Jet-engine AI Research & Validation Intensive Sprint — is a one-month, MIT-hard design–build–test program where teams of undergraduates use frontier AI copilots to conceive, fabricate, and hot-fire a working small gas turbine engine. The challenge will run during MIT’s January Independent Activities Period (IAP) and aims to demonstrate that artificial intelligence can compress the aerospace design–build–test cycle to near-software speed without compromising rigor, safety, or performance. JARVIS is both an educational experiment and a research demonstration: a test of whether next-generation engineers, equipped with large language models and rapid-manufacturing tools, can outperform traditional teams on a technically unforgiving, safety-critical system. The outcome will be a tangible proof point that AI can augment human ingenuity in the physical sciences.