Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence

08/24/2026

Stanford HAI and the Stanford Center on Early Childhood are seeking a postdoctoral scholar to develop AI tools for instructional coaching in early childhood settings — working at the intersection of multimodal machine learning, human-in-the-loop systems, and real-world deployment.

Applications reviewed on a rolling basis.
https://postdocs.stanford.edu/prospective/opportunities/open-postdoctoral-position-faculty-mentor-philip-fisher

08/22/2026

Dozens of municipalities still have laws on the books for segregated schools, poll taxes, and male-only voter eligibility.

Stanford RegLab Director and Stanford HAI Associate Director Daniel E. Ho in the Washington Post on how AI is helping governments scan more than 3 billion words of legal code to find outdated provisions that have quietly consumed civil servant time for decades.

Read more:

Outdated rules are gumming up governments across the country.

08/21/2026

What makes human intelligence fundamentally irreplaceable by AI?

Stanford HAI Founding Director Fei-Fei Li joins Andrew Huberman on the Huberman Lab podcast to discuss how humans collaborating with AI and robots stand to transform health and human experience — and why the intuition and unique experiences that make you human are something no machine can replicate.

Listen here:

Dr. Fei-Fei Li, PhD, is a professor of computer science at Stanford...

08/21/2026

Can AI help analysts detect nuclear proliferation in satellite imagery? Stanford HAI Senior Fellow Mykel Kochenderfer and Hoover Senior Fellow and Stanford HAI Associate Director Amy Zegart are designing AI agents to comb through multilingual documents, images, and satellite photos to identify potential nuclear development — at a scale no human analyst could manage alone:

Stanford HAI and the Hoover Institution’s Technology Policy Accelerator back projects examining AI's role in detecting nuclear proliferation, U.S.-China competition, and political influence.

08/21/2026

Delighted to host regional elected officials and policy staff at Stanford for a special briefing on the 2026 AI Index.

Index editor Sha Sajadieh shared insights on the rapidly evolving AI landscape—from capabilities and adoption to investment and global competitiveness—and led a thoughtful discussion about what these trends mean for California and the region.

We’re grateful to the Silicon Valley Leadership Group team, especially Ahmad Thomas, ZiYang David Fan, and the Institute for California AI Policy as well as Kelly Kline and other Stanford collaborators for bringing together leaders committed to engaging deeply with the opportunities and challenges ahead.

08/19/2026

Russ Poldrack, director of the Center for Open and Reproducible Science, has scanned his own brain hundreds of times — revealing how individual brain patterns are more reliable, and more varied, than researchers once thought.

In this episode of The Future of Everything, HAI Associate Director Russ Altman interviews Poldrack on what functional MRI is revealing about OCD, depression, and human behavior — and the ethical implications of reading the brain.

Listen here:

Podcast Episode · The Future of Everything · August 14 · 34m

08/19/2026

Stanford's Stanford Digital Economy Lab and Trustworthy AI Research just launched SimulacraBench — a NeurIPS 2026 competition in collaboration with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, UNICEF, and The World Bank Group.

Teams can compete to validate whether AI can faithfully simulate hard-to-reach populations against unreleased UN microdata.

Learn more: simulacrabench.org

08/18/2026

Thanks to the incredible congressional staffers who joined us on campus this week for the Stanford HAI Congressional Boot Camp on AI! Over three days, we explored how AI is transforming everything from health care and education to national security and energy — and what smart, human-centered policy can look like. Thank you to the staffers, who brought sharp questions, and our panelists of faculty and industry leaders, who brought deep insight.

08/18/2026

The smarter X’s “For You” algorithm gets at reading your behavior, the further it drifts from what you actually want.

A new study partially supported by Stanford HAI finds a fundamental misalignment between algorithmically curated feeds and users' stated personal values — and it comes down to how platforms measure interest.

“The values that we hold — what we really care about — should be just as informative to the platforms as engagement,” says Michael Bernstein, professor of computer science and Stanford HAI Senior Fellow.

Read more:

A new Stanford-led study finds that X’s “For You” algorithm mistakes outrage for interest – and fills your feed accordingly.

08/17/2026

AI sovereignty is being operationalized as strategic diversification, not full self-sufficiency.

Governments worldwide are pouring resources into sovereignty strategies, and a sprawling commercial market has emerged to meet that demand. Stanford HAI's policy issue brief surveys what those solutions actually deliver and argues that the core policy challenge is not eliminating dependence, but calibrating it strategically.

Read the full brief:
https://hai.stanford.edu/policy/the-commercial-landscape-of-ai-sovereignty-offerings