Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI)

AI agents can book your travel, manage your finances, and reschedule your doctor's appointments. The more data an AI agent can access, the more useful it becomes — but also the more it can infer about your health, finances, or immigration status from data you never explicitly shared. Our new issue brief raises two urgent questions: Will agents act in users’ best interests when developer incentives diverge, and who is liable when they don’t? The authors argue that AI agent developers and deployers should be subject to a duty of loyalty and outline what a fiduciary framework would require from standards bodies, regulators, and Congress. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gitHV5tb

How is AI transforming empirical research? Stanford HAI's Stanford Causal Science Center and Stanford University Graduate School of Business are hosting the Empirical Methods in the Age of AI Conference on October 2-3, 2026. The conference brings together leading academics and industry practitioners to explore how AI is reshaping data collection, causal inference, econometrics, and research workflows. The program will feature keynote talks, panels, and discussions. Poster abstracts featuring new research, works in progress, and applied projects are welcome. Deadline: August 31. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gWYvUezE

Large language models are trained on millions of authors — but converge on a single, homogeneous voice that flattens the variation between one human writer and another. A group of psychologists and computer scientists developed PsychAdapter to reintroduce human variation into AI-generated text by giving researchers control over personality, age, and mental health characteristics in language generation. The result opens new possibilities for therapy training, personalized education, and social science research: https://lnkd.in/gHjXDy6M

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://lnkd.in/g84WhRSf

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: https://lnkd.in/e2Xv5k-3

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: https://lnkd.in/eQdBPipy

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:  https://lnkd.in/gfbBnRmm

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.

Russell 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: https://lnkd.in/g2NNA4vc

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