Benchmark
Stanford HAI's annual AI Index report for 2026, tracking AI adoption, model performance, investment and US–China competition.
Stanford puts AI use at 88% of organizations while agent deployment stays in single digits. The surveys on earnings impact point to one distinction, whether anyone redesigned the work the tools sit in.
Reality
Adoption is near universal while production scaling stays in single digits, which an HPE practice leader reads as evidence that boards are measuring the one AI bill that is falling and absorbing the other two.
Reality
Positive AI comments in US employer reviews fell from 81 percent to 43 percent, and the sharpest skepticism sits with the software engineers reading the diffs rather than the architects and executives above them.
Reality
Two hundred suspended accounts drawn from a farm of 200,000 are being asked to explain a 12-point jump in local opposition to data centres, and the arithmetic does not stretch that far, which leaves developers paying the same siting bill they were paying last week.
Reality
The company says its in-house Thomson-1 matches Claude Opus 4.8 on internal evals, and that the Alibaba base is de-biased. Nobody outside can check either claim.
Reality
A payments company is paying model-lab money for the layer that decides which model gets the request. The routing decision and the settlement decision are converging into one stack.
Reality