China nearly erases US lead in AI as Stanford report reveals widening gap between experts and public

The votes are in: AI will hurt elections and relationships

Latest report from Stanford's AI boffins finds unsafe usage practices, widespread anxiety about impacts, and China catching up to the USA Artificial intelligence has achieved mass adoption faster than the personal computer or the internet, reaching 53 percent of the population in just three years. The number of harmful AI incidents has increased correspondingly. And both experts and laypeople believe the impact will be felt in two areas: Elections and relationships. According to the 2026 AI Index Report [PDF], from Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), "Responsible AI is not keeping pace with AI capability, with safety benchmarks lagging and incidents rising sharply." Documented AI incidents - defined as "harms or near harms realized in the real world by the deployment of artificial intelligence systems" by the AI Incident Database - reached 362 in 2025, up from 233 in 2024, the report says. That coincides with an increase in AI adoption: 88 percent of organizations say they're using AI and about 80 percent of university students admit as much. One possible explanation for that finding is that AI models have become quite good at programming, with scores on the SWE-bench test of success tackling real-world GitHub issues rising from 60 percent to close to 100 percent in the space of a year. High scores on a particular benchmark don't tell the full story because all AI models tend to be deficient in different areas. On the AA-Omniscient Index, designed to assess whether models will admit when they're unsure about something instead of just guessing, hallucination rates across 26 models varied from 22 percent to 94 percent. When attorneys use AI models to make "over two dozen fake citations and misrepresentations of fact," and get called out for it by the US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, that's an example of what the Stanford HAI researchers mean when they say responsible AI hasn't kept pace with usage. And despite all the talk about AI superintelligence, AI lags behind people when it comes to telling time - OpenAI's GPT-5.4 High managed to read analog clocks correctly just 50.6 percent of the time as of March 2026, compared to about 90 percent for "unspecialized humans," as described in the ClockBench benchmark [PDF]. Robots demonstrate even less competence, succeeding in only 12 percent of household tasks, based on the BEHAVIOR-1K simulation benchmark. The HAI report, at 423 pages, represents the Stanford group's summary of the current state of AI research and its impact on society. Written by human researchers with help from ChatGPT and Claude, not to mention financial support from Google, OpenAI, and others, the report's findings extend beyond the scarcity of "responsible AI" to touch on various aspects of the AI industry. In terms of public opinion, the report finds "AI experts and the US public disagree on nearly everything about AI's future, except that it will hurt elections and personal relationships." Sixty-four percent of the American public expect AI will reduce the number of jobs available to humans over the next two decades, while five percent foresee AI creating more jobs. Only 39 percent of experts anticipate fewer jobs while 19 percent of experts project more employment. Experts, however, believe that generative AI will contribute to 80 percent of US work hours by 2030, compared to the public's prediction of 10 percent. Just 31 percent of US respondents said they trust in their government to regulate AI responsibly, the lowest level of any country. With OpenAI backing an Illinois state bill that would limit the liability of AI companies in the event their models cause catastrophic harm, and the White House pursuing an "industry-friendly AI policy," it's not difficult to see how Americans might have doubts about their government's interest in protecting them. The HAI report observes that Chinese AI models have closed the performance gap with US AI models. As of March 2026, the top US model, Claude Opus 4.6 scored 1,503 on the Arena benchmark, just 2.7 percentage points above ByteDance's Dola-Seed Preview at 1,464. That lead had narrowed as of April 9, 2026, with Claude Opus 4.6 Thinking at 1,548, closely followed by Z.ai's GLM-5.1 at 1,530. The US continues to lead in AI investment, said to have reached $285.9 billion in 2025. That's 23 times more than the $12.4 billion invested in China, though the report notes it may have under-counted government funding. Even so, the US is losing technical talent. "The number of AI researchers and developers moving to the US has dropped 89 percent since 2017, with an 80 percent decline in the last year alone," the report finds. ®

Stanford's annual AI report finds a gap between AI insiders and everyone else

The 2026 AI Index from Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI documents a deepening disconnect between expert optimism and public anxiety. Gen Z anger about AI is rising fast. Employment in AI-exposed fields among younger workers is already declining. And the US has the lowest trust in its government to regulate AI of any country surveyed. Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) released its annual AI Index Report on Monday, and its most striking finding is not about model performance or investment volumes, it is about the widening gulf between those building AI and those living with it. Across nearly every dimension the 423-page report examines, expert opinion and public sentiment point in opposite directions. "AI experts and the US public disagree on nearly everything about AI's future," the report concludes, with the notable exception that both groups believe AI will hurt elections and personal relationships. The numbers are stark. A Pew Research study published last month, cited by the report, found that only 10% of Americans said they were more excited than concerned about the increased use of AI in daily life. Among AI experts surveyed for the same report, 56% said they believed AI would have a positive impact on the US over the next 20 years. The gap is largest around the economy and jobs: 69% of experts felt AI would benefit the economy, against 21% of the general public. On whether AI will have a positive impact on how people do their jobs, 73% of experts said yes, compared with 23% of the public. And while 84% of experts said AI would largely benefit medical care over the next 20 years, only 44% of the US public agreed. Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of Americans, 64%, believe AI will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years. The report notes that employment among younger workers in AI-exposed fields has already started to decline, suggesting the public's concern is not merely theoretical. Gen Z's relationship with AI is particularly revealing. A Gallup poll conducted for the Walton Family Foundation and GSV Ventures in February and March 2026, surveying 1,572 people aged 14-29, found that the share of Gen Z respondents who describe themselves as excited about AI fell from 36% in 2025 to 22% in 2026. The proportion feeling hopeful dropped from 27% to 18%. The proportion feeling angry rose from 22% to 31%. This is happening even though around half of Gen Z uses AI either daily or weekly. Gallup's senior education researcher Zach Hrynowski attributed the rising anger to AI dimming prospects for entry-level workers, noting that the oldest members of Gen Z, those most exposed to the job market, are the angriest. On regulation, the disconnect is geographically notable. The US reported the lowest trust in its own government to regulate AI of any country surveyed, at 31%. Singapore ranked highest, at 81%. Globally, 41% of Americans said federal AI regulation would not go far enough, while only 27% said it would go too far. The EU is trusted more than the US or China to regulate AI effectively, according to a separate Pew survey of 25 countries. The report also documents the gap between AI's technical achievements and its societal costs. AI reached 53% of the population faster than the personal computer or the internet. Documented AI incidents, defined as harms or near-harms from deployed AI systems, reached 362 in 2025, up from 233 in 2024, as 88% of organisations now report using AI. The environmental footprint is growing correspondingly: training xAI's Grok 4 is estimated to have produced more than 72,000 tonnes of CO₂, and the water required for GPT-4o inference workloads is said to be enough to sustain 12 million people. The report notes, with some irony, that despite AI's rapid advance, the best frontier models still read analog clocks correctly only around 50% of the time, compared with roughly 90% for unspecialised humans. Stanford's report acknowledges its own limitations: it is financially supported by Google, OpenAI, and others, and was produced with assistance from ChatGPT and Claude. Its finding that "Responsible AI is not keeping pace with AI capability, with safety benchmarks lagging and incidents rising sharply" lands as an implicit critique of the very organisations that helped fund its publication.

China Is Starting to Pull Ahead of US in AI Race

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Back in 2017, China's state council laid out the first draft of its long-term AI strategy in a sweeping policy paper. By 2030, it declared, China should have developed its "AI industry competitiveness" to a "world-leading level," an ambitious goal for a country whose future economic prosperity was not a given. Today, China's patient cultivation of world-leading AI is bearing lush fruit, while the US struggles to harvest from its own blighted grove. If we truly are in the midst of an epic AI arms race -- as any China hawk will loudly declare to be the case -- then the PRC is clearly taking the lead. Every year, Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered AI publishes a major report on the state of AI around the world. According to its recently released 2026 paper, first reported by Fortune, America's AI crown is now slipping. China now leads the world in AI research publications and citations, and is deploying industrial AI-integrated robots at nearly nine times the US rate. Then there are the patents, which is where the story really gets ugly. In 2024, China represented over 74 percent of the world's AI patent grants, compared to a distant 12 percent by the US, and a paltry 3 percent from the European Union, Stanford found. International economists reached the same conclusion in a yet-to-be peer reviewed paper, arguing that America's AI patents are few and far between because they're "highly concentrated among a small set of large private firms." While the top US AI models still have a technical edge in Arena scores -- rankings that measure the quality of an AI system, basically -- the "substantial lead" American AI once had "shrank considerably by early 2025," the Stanford report admits. "US and Chinese models have traded places at the top of performance rankings multiple times since early 2025," the report states. "In February 2025, DeepSeek-R1 briefly matched the top US model. As of March 2026, the top U.S. model leads by 2.7 percent, with a gap that fluctuated over the past year while remaining in the single digits." America does lead in one category: investment. Last year, US private interests spent $258.9 billion on AI, against China's $12.4 billion. If this is an arms race, as the hawks would claim, the US is eating some very expensive dust. "For years, the US outpaced all other global regions on AI -- in model size, performance, artificial intelligence research, citations, and more," Stanford's summary of the report concludes. "But China emerged as an AI counterweight to the US, gradually gaining ground, and this year it appears to have nearly erased any US lead."

China has 'nearly erased' America's lead in AI -- and the flow of tech experts moving to the U.S. is slowing to a trickle, Stanford report says | Fortune

China has taken a bite out of the U.S.'s lead in artificial intelligence. The country has nearly closed its gap to the U.S. in AI bot performance, while continuing to best global competition in number of patents, publications, and rollout of robots, according to Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) 2026 AI Index report released this week. The report found a shrinking gap in Arena scores -- a metric indicating relative performances of large-language models -- between the top AI bots in the U.S. and China. In May 2023, the U.S.'s top model, OpenAI's GPT-4, led with more than 1,300 Arena points compared to China's fewer than 1,000. By March 2026, that gulf shrank to just 39 Arena points, with the top U.S. model, Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6, leading China's Dola-Seed 2.0 by just 2.7%. While the U.S. still beats China in the number of top AI models -- 50 compared to 30 -- China has more publication citations than the U.S., accounting for 20.6% of AI citations in 2024 compared to the U.S.'s 12.6%. China also has nearly nine times the volume of industrial robot installations, leading the world with more than 295,000, compared to the U.S.'s 34,200. "For years, the U.S. outpaced all other global regions on AI -- in model size, performance, artificial intelligence research, citations, and more," said Stanford's summary of the report. "But China emerged as an AI counterweight to the U.S., gradually gaining ground, and this year it appears to have nearly erased any U.S. lead." China's AI surge Despite fewer investment dollars and wider regulatory constraints, China has changed the narrative of its ability to compete against the U.S. in a broader tech war. Spurred by its 2025 "DeepSeek moment," China has poured funding into AI startups, with IPOs in Hong Kong last quarter reaching a five-year high of $110 billion across 40 new listings. China has also quietly invested in its electricity infrastructure, adding more electricity demand than the entire consumption of Germany every year, David Fishman, a China energy analyst with the Lantau Group, previously said in an interview with Fortune. The country's reserve margin has never dipped below 80%, Fishman said, essentially giving it twice the necessary capacity to grow AI compute. China's compute capacity is a far cry from the U.S.'s own ability to sustain and grow AI infrastructure. The American power grid system is crumbling as a result of decades of underinvestment, making it vulnerable to extreme weather and natural disasters, and ultimately creating a bottleneck Goldman Sachs suggests would stymie AI growth in the U.S. "We've actually reduced our exposure to U.S. tech," Mohit Kumar, Jefferies' global macro strategist, told Fortune at the bank's Asia Forum in Hong Kong last month. "We believe that China is the big winner in this tech war for a number of reasons: valuation, wider adoption of AI, an advantage in power generation." American private investment in AI still far exceeds China, reaching $285.9 billion in 2025, more than 23 times greater than China's $12.4 billion. The U.S. funded 1,953 new AI companies last year, more than 10 times any other country, the Stanford report noted. AI's momentum swing in China's favor may be contributing to a slowdown in tech talent entering the U.S. The Stanford report found the number of AI scholars moving to the U.S. dropped 89% since 2017, and that decline is happening precipitously, accelerating 80% in the last year alone. At this juncture, more researchers are still entering the U.S. than leaving it. "The U.S. is home to the most AI researchers and developers of any country by far," the report summary said. "But the flow of these experts into the country is dramatically slowing." Economists have warned a continued loss of expertise would further erode the edge the U.S. has over China in its talent pool. An April 2025 Hoover Institute report conducted in partnership with Stanford HAI found China has built a massive cohort of homegrown talent, with nearly all researchers behind DeepSeek's five foundations papers educated or trained in China. Though about a quarter of DeekSeek researchers were educated in U.S. institutions, most returned to China, creating a "one-way knowledge transfer" in China's favor, according to the report. "These talent patterns represent a fundamental challenge to U.S. technological leadership that export controls and computing investments alone cannot address," the authors wrote.

Stanford: China 'effectively' closes US AI model performance gap

AI productivity gains are often seen in the same sectors that cut entry-level jobs. The US is no longer leading the AI model race, says the latest Stanford AI Index report, which finds that the performance gap between the two countries' models has "effectively closed". The AI Index is an initiative at the Stanford Institute for Human-centered Artificial Intelligence. In its eighth edition last year, it found that even though Chinese AI models were fast catching up in performance, the US was still placed as the clear leader in the race. That, however, has changed. Since early 2025, several Chinese models have taken the lead over their American counterparts, with China's DeepSeek-R1 marking the first large instance in February. Models from Chinese companies such as Alibaba, Zhipu and MiniMax have since continuously ranked high in leaderboards. The US, however, continues to be AI's biggest backer, still producing more "top-tier" AI models and high-impact patents, while China is leading the game in volume, industrial robot installations, citations and patent output. Private AI investment in the US reached around $285bn in 2025, with nearly 2,000 newly-funded AI companies forming in the year's time. The country also hosts the most number of AI data centres. Talent loss AI has undoubtedly cemented its presence in society. Stanford reports that AI has reached mass adoption faster than the personal computer or the internet. Generative AI has already been adopted by more than 50pc of the population, with numbers sitting at 61pc in Singapore, 54pc in United Arab Emirates, and around 28pc in the US. The technology is fast accelerating in capabilities, reaching more of the population than ever before. Many of the notable AI models released last year can meet or exceed human baselines on PhD-level science questions, multimodal reasoning, and competition mathematics, the report finds, creating challenging circumstances for job seekers. AI models purpose-built for science can outperform human scientists in many cases, it adds. On the flip side, the report finds connections between a decline in entry-level employment and productivity gains. The software development sector, which shows the clearest markers of productivity gains, saw a 20pc decline in US-based employees aged 22 to 25 years old. Senior positions with older developers are growing in count, meanwhile. Despite the massive investments, the US is struggling to attract global talent, with an 80pc drop in AI researchers and developers choosing to move to the country. Responsibility takes a backseat The report notes that responsible AI is not keeping up with AI capability, pointing to a lag in safety benchmarks and "spotty" reporting on benchmarks. Documented AI incidents rose to 362, up from 233 in 2024. Meanwhile, a recent study found that improving AI safety can affect model accuracy, adding to the challenge of improving model safety. The report also touches on AI sovereignty, calling it a "defining feature of national policies". The EU, for one, launched the AI Continent Action Plan last April, promising to enhance AI infrastructure and reduce dependence for its technological needs. However, newer open source developments - most notably, Open Claw - are helping redistribute who participates in the AI race. Technology firms are taking advantage of the widely accessible open source models by creating their own versions of OpenClaw with enhanced security. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

China has erased the US lead in AI, Stanford HAI's 2026 AI index reveals - SiliconANGLE

China has erased the US lead in AI, Stanford HAI's 2026 AI index reveals Stanford University researchers today released their highly anticipated 2026 AI Index Report, revealing a global landscape where artificial intelligence technology is being adopted at record-breaking pace, even as public trust in AI oversight and transparency hits new lows. The report by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, known as Stanford HAI, is now into its ninth year. It's a comprehensive annual study that tracks the dizzying evolution of the AI industry, documenting a world in which America's lead over Chinese innovation has all but evaporated, and where the technology is already reshaping global workforces and changing the course of scientific discovery. One of the most striking - and potentially concerning - takeaways from this year's report is the way China has reportedly erased the AI performance gap between itself and the U.S. In previous year's reports, the U.S. had always held a solid lead over Chinese innovators, but now the countries are neck-and-neck, with U.S. and Chinese models constantly trading places at the top of benchmarks ranking AI performance. Although the U.S. maintains a significant edge in terms of capital, infrastructure buildout and AI chips, China now holds sway in other key areas, such as patents, publications and autonomous robotics development, also known as "physical AI." However, the report notes that it's no longer a two-horse race, with other nations also striving to be seen as "AI superpowers." These include South Korea, which has emerged as the world's leader in terms of "innovation density," filing more patents per capita than any other country. As these countries all scramble for AI supremacy, the issue of "sovereignty" has become a top policy priority for many governments. A number of European and Central Asian countries have invested significantly in their AI infrastructure over the last year, bringing the number of nations with "state-backed supercomputing clusters" to 44. However, the push for sovereign AI is not universal. South American and Middle Eastern nations lag far behind. According to Stanford's researchers, this could lead to a new kind of "digital divide," where those nations that struggle to shape AI development are less likely to see the economic benefits. More than 90% of all notable AI models are now created by private companies, and Stanford's researchers warn that this is leading to less transparency than before. Concerns about AI "black boxes" are nothing new, but the most powerful new models being released today are even more mysterious than their predecessors. According to the report, AI leaders including Google LLC, Anthropic PBC and OpenAI Group PBC have all abandoned the practice of disclosing their latest model's dataset sizes and training duration. Moreover, 80 of the 95 most notable models launched last year were released without their training code. Meanwhile, these leading AI companies are now trying to flex their political muscles. AI industry representatives have become pervasive in AI congressional hearings, with their share of witnesses tripling since 2017, while the presence of neutral academics has plummeted. This shift, perhaps unsurprisingly, comes at a time when public trust in AI hits a new low. The report found that just 31% of U.S. citizens now trust their government to regulate AI properly, which was the lowest score of all surveyed nations except China, where just 27% of people trust their government. EU citizens remain much more confident, with 53% of people voicing confidence. There are also concerns about hardware supply chains, with almost the entire global AI industry still being dependent on a single chipmaking foundry operated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. in Taiwan. The adoption of generative AI has grown faster than any other technology in history, the report found. Some 53% of the world's population now uses it regularly, outpacing the pace of innovations such as personal computers, the internet and smartphones. But opinions of the technology are mixed, with 59% saying it provides more benefits than drawbacks, and 52% saying it makes them nervous. Of concern, perhaps, is that while the U.S. leads in AI development, it only ranks 24th globally in terms of adoption, with just 28.3% of Americans using generative AI regularly. That compares with China, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore, where more than 80% of people expect AI to have a profound impact on their lives within the next three to five years. The economic impact of AI is staggering too: Since 2013, corporate investment has increased by 40-fold, while the consumer surplus associated with generative AI in the U.S. rose to $172 billion this year. Another highlight of the report is the growing "vibe shift" between experts and the general public. While 73% of AI experts are optimistic about the technology's impact on jobs, just 23% of the public shares that belief. The skepticism of average citizens does seem justified, though, as the report notes that employment among younger workers in "AI-exposed fields" has already started to decline. In addition, the report touches on the physical costs of AI's incredible growth. The industry's energy and water demands are becoming worryingly excessive. For instance, xAI Corp. is estimated to have created more than 72,000 tons of CO2 just to train its latest model, Grok 4. Meanwhile, the amount of water required for GPT-4o inference workloads is said to be enough to sustain 12 million people. Finally, there are concerns about AI's impact on science, particularly in terms of its scope. Though AI tools have helped to make individual scientists three times more productive, this appears to be happening at the expense of the scope of AI research, which increasingly favors data-rich topics, meaning less diversity than before.

AI Nervousness Grows Most in India; Workplace Usage Highest in Emerging Economies: Stanford

The report highlights the growing change in perspective towards AI across the world with the US citizens being the most concerned Increasing divergence around public opinion and AI experts on scope of artificial intelligence and heightened nervousness among users in India are some of the key factors shared by Stanford University researchers in their latest annual report released last night. What was of particular interest in the report was the growing trend of anxiety around AI and concerns around how the technology will impact key social parameters such as job loss, medical care and the overall economic wellbeing of a country. Between 2024 and 2025, India registered the sharpest rise in concern around AI usage (+14 percentage points) with only a modest increase in excitement, the report says. "Led by a steering committee of academic and industry experts and produced by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centred AI, the Artificial Intelligence Index has tracked the field's evolution since 2017, measuring everything from technical capabilities and research output to societal impact and public perception, says a report published by Stanford University. What began as an effort to bring rigor and transparency to AI's rapid development has become the field's most comprehensive annual snapshot -- a data-driven portrait of where artificial intelligence stands, where it's headed, and what it means for society, the university says. The study also reported that young people were growing less hopeful and more angry about the technology, despite the fact that around half of those surveyed was either using AI daily or on a weekly basis. In fact, a recent Gallup poll noted that negative sentiment around AI was growing with Gen Z leading the way. The report notes that while AI experts are going ga-ga over progress, public opinion is not exactly in sync with them. It says while AI capabilities measured on benchmarks have grown, not all capabilities are evenly distributed. While frontier models meet or exceed human capabilities on doctorate-level questions, multi- modal reasoning and competition mathematics, it lags behind in other tasks such as learning from video, generating video that is coherent and realistic, telling the time, managing multiple-step planning, conducting financial analysis, and answering expert-level academic exams. Public sentiment towards AI has also grown complex where 59% of people felt optimistic about its benefits (up from 52%). However, it turns out that the US is more wary than other countries with only 33% Americans expecting AI to make their lives better, compared to a global average of 40%. What's more, US citizens had the least trust in their government's capability to regulate AI among all the countries surveyed. Only 31% of Americans felt the government gets it right. There are also specific areas where it had performed poorly but has seen major improvement. For example, the success rate of agents handling real-world tasks improved from 20% in 2025 to 77.3% today, according to Terminal-Bench, while AI agents handling cybersecurity issues solved problems 93% of the time compared to 15% in 2024, the report said. The report notes that AI models are achieving breakthrough results in science and complex reasoning, but at a concerning environmental toll. America is outspending any other country on AI, but is finding it harder to attract top talent. Meanwhile, AI's workforce disruption has moved from prediction to reality, hitting young workers first. It also highlights some other facets... As AI capabilities improve, the environmental impact grows. "Grok 4's estimated training emissions reached 72,816 tons of CO2 equivalent, or roughly the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions created from driving 17,000 cars for one year," it notes adding that AI datacentre capacity rose to 29.6 GW, which it what New York state draws during peak demand. Using these investments, the US outpaced all other global regions on AI in terms of size, performance, AI research, citations etc. However, China is now an AI counterweight to the US and could almost erase the lead that existed between the two countries. Also, US and Chinese models have traded places in performance rankings multiple times since early 2025. For years, the U.S. outpaced all other global regions on AI - in model size, performance, artificial intelligence research, citations, and more. But China emerged as an AI counterweight to the U.S., "In February 2025, DeepSeek-R1 briefly matched the top U.S. model, and as of March 2026 Anthropic's top model leads by just 2.7%. The U.S. still produces more top-tier AI models and higher-impact patents, while China leads in publication volume, citations, patent output, and industrial robot installations," the report says. It also noted that from being the home of most AI researchers and developers, the US is now losing these experts to other countries. "The number of AI scholars moving to the United States has dropped 89% since 2017. That decline is accelerating, down 80% in the last year alone," says the report. However, the US still leads other when it comes to AI investments. Overall, global corporate AI investments hit $581.7 billion in 2025, up 130% from the prior year, while private placements touched $344.7 billion, a spike of 127.5% from 2024, with the US leading all other countries in spending AI dollars. The country invested $285.9 billion, which was 23.1 times greater China ($12.4 billion), the next highest. Despite the robust growth in investments, productivity gains from AI appear in the same fields where entry-level employment is declining. "Employment among software developers aged 22-25 has plummeted nearly 20% since 2024, even as their older colleagues' headcount grows. The pattern repeats in other jobs with higher levels of AI exposure, like customer service." The report also highlighted a dichotomy in that the most capable modern models are also the least transparent. These powerful models stay inside the largest AI companies that are keeping the training code, dataset sizes and parameter counts to themselves. "The Foundation Model Transparency Index, which measures how openly major AI companies disclose details about their models' training data, compute, capabilities, risks, and usage policies, saw average scores drop to 40 points from last year's 58. The index noted that the most capable models often disclose the least amount of information," the report says. Amidst all the gloom, there is one area where AI has received accolades. Public optimism towards AI stands at 59%, up from 52%. However, in the US people are more wary than other countries with only 33% Americans expecting AI to make their lives better, compared to a global average of 40%. What's more, US citizens had the least trust in their government's capability to regulate AI among all the countries surveyed. Only 31% of Americans felt the government gets it right.

India leads world in AI skill penetration and AI nervousness

India's AI anxiety spiked the most of any country, as AI familiarity increased The recently announced Stanford AI Index 2026 has lots of detailed data points about how AI at large, and everyone associated with the AI industry, is marching ahead in full steam. This is a rich 423-page report, where India has a substantial presence. Of course, reading the Stanford University report on AI may not be everyone's cup of tea, so this article is specifically highlighting all the India-specific mentions in the report. There's some bright spots and a few worth worrying about. Following is the breakdown of all the key India-specific insights: According to the Stanford AI Index 2026, India produced 7.6% of all AI publications in the field of computer science in 2024. This puts India ahead of the US, ranking third globally, behind only China (at 17.8%) and Europe (at 11.1%) as a whole. On GitHub, India accounts for 5.2% of all open-source AI projects which are ranked at least 10 stars, and India's contribution to open-source AI projects continues to grow even as China's share has slowed down since 2019, as per the Stanford AI Index 2026. Also read: India becoming world's most important AI developer hub, says GitHub In terms of patents, this is where a lot of work needs to be done in India. The AI Index 2026 suggests India's share of global AI patents is miniscule at just 0.4% which represents just over 500 patents till 2024. But India's portfolio of patents shows roughly 80% overlap with the US and China. This means India is innovating in the same AI domains as the US and China, not doing anything drastically different. This is possibly the greatest recognition of India in the Stanford AI Index 2026, proclaiming that India holds the top spot globally in terms of relative AI skill penetration - which is three times the global average on LinkedIn. What this means is that on LinkedIn profiles of Indian members AI skills appear three times more than anywhere else in the world. However, there's a notable gender gap as well, which the Stanford AI report highlights. Indian men list AI skills at 3.1x the global average versus only 1.9x for women, which highlights the acute disparity within the country when it comes to AI skills being developed across the workforce. With respect to AI talent, India ranked second in the world in terms of absolute number of top AI authors and inventors, behind only the US and in front of Germany, for instance. But this is because India's top AI talent resides in the US, a fact highlighted in the Stanford AI Index 2026 with respect to India incurring the largest net outflow of AI talent in 2025 than anywhere else in the world. But as domestic opportunities grow, India is beginning to transition from a net exporter of AI talent to retaining the talent and giving it reason to stay home. Also read: India AI Impact Summit 2026: Microsoft pledges $50 billion to bridge Global South AI divide In this regard, India (alongside the UAE and Saudi Arabia) highlighted the fastest growth in AI talent concentration, growing over 100% between 2019 and 2025, according to the Stanford AI Index 2026. India is one of the top adopters in the workplace, as over 80% of Indian respondents reported using AI at work on a regular basis, as per the Stanford AI Index 2026 report. This places India alongside China, Nigeria, UAE, and Saudi Arabia, countries that are all much ahead of most North American and European countries where workplace AI adoption numbers hover around the 50% mark. Organisationally, around 85-90% of Indian respondents reported their organisation actively supports AI strategy and literacy. However, there's also some worrying news. According to the Stanford AI Index 2026, India also recorded the highest growth in AI nervousness of any country surveyed, where AI nervousness grew by 14% between 2024-2025. The report contextualises this as Indians' growing awareness of AI risks as they get more familiar with AI tools.