Sha Sajadieh, AI Index Lead, comments on HAI's 2026 AI Index findings.

"If you’re following AI news, you’re probably getting whiplash. AI is a gold rush. AI is a bubble. AI is taking your job. AI can’t even read a clock. The 2026 AI Index from Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, AI’s annual report card, comes out today and cuts through some of that noise."

Stanford University President Jon Levin highlights Stanford’s pivotal role in shaping the future of AI, pointing to Stanford HAI as a leader in advancing its ethical development and deployment.

"The ultimate problem is that you just can't control where the information goes, and it could leak out in ways that you just don't anticipate," says HAI Privacy and Data Policy Fellow Jennifer King.

Fei-Fei Li, Co-Founder of Stanford HAI, speaks about the importance of learning about new technologies.

HAI Co-Founder Fei-Fei Li is nominated as one of the USA Today's 2026 Women of the Year.

HAI Co-Director Fei-Fei Li named one of America's top 250 greatest innovators, alongside fellow Stanford affiliates Rodney Brooks, Carolyn Bertozzi, Daphne Koller, and Andrew Ng.

HAI Co-Director James Landay urges people to think about what "AI for good" means today. He argues, "we need to move beyond just thinking about the user. We’ve got to think about broader communities who are impacted by AI systems if we actually want them to be good.”

HAI Senior Fellow Yejin Choi discussed responsible AI model training at Davos, asking, “What if there could be an alternative form of intelligence that really learns … morals, human values from the get-go, as opposed to just training LLMs on the entirety of the internet, which actually includes the worst part of humanity, and then we then try to patch things up by doing ‘alignment’?” 

Axios chief technology correspondent Ina Fried speaks to HAI Senior Fellow Yejin Choi at Axios House in Davos during the World Economic Forum.

Elon Musk was forced to put restrictions on X and its AI chatbot, Grok, after its image generator sparked outrage around the world. Grok created non-consensual sexualized images, prompting some countries to ban the bot. Liz Landers discussed Grok's troubles with Riana Pfefferkorn of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Riana Pfefferkorn, Policy Fellow at HAI, urges immediate Congressional hearings to scope a legal safe harbor for AI-generated child sexual abuse materials following a recent scandal with Grok's newest generative image features.

HAI Policy Fellow Riana Pfefferkorn discusses the policy implications of the "mass digital undressing spree,” where the chatbot Grok responded to user prompts to remove the clothing from images of women and pose them in bikinis and to create "sexualized images of children" and post them on X.

HAI Co-Director James Landay and HAI Senior Fellow Erik Brynjolfsson discuss the impacts of AI in 2025 and the future of AI in 2026.

As AI-hallucinated case citations flood the courts, judges have increased fines for attorneys who have cited fake cases. HAI Policy Fellow Riana Pfefferkorn hopes this will "make the firm sit up and pay better attention."

Shana Lynch, HAI Head of Content and Associate Director of Communications, pointed out the "'era of AI evangelism is giving way to an era of AI evaluation,'" in her AI predictions piece, where she interviewed several Stanford AI experts on their insights for AI impacts in 2026.

Erik Brynjolfsson, HAI Senior Fellow and Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, advocates for humans as an end and not just a means to an end, emphasizing augmentation of human tasks for true economic gains.

"This is AI’s next frontier, and why 2025 was such a pivotal year," writes HAI Co-Director Fei-Fei Li.