Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) and the Hoover Institution’s Technology Policy Accelerator have awarded three research grants worth $100,000 each to study how artificial intelligence could affect global security, US-China competition and political decision making.
The grants are part of a new programme launched in April 2026, when Stanford HAI and Hoover invited researchers to propose projects examining the possibilities that foundation models, agents, and AI systems present for global policy experts.
The programme requires each research team to bring together technical expertise with expertise from the social sciences and humanities. The three selected projects will be carried out over the next year.
The projects will focus on nuclear proliferation, U.S.-China competition, and political influence in foundation models. The first project “Human-Centered AI for Proliferation Monitoring” will examine how AI can help identify possible nuclear proliferation.
Led by Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and HAI Senior Fellow Mykel Kochenderfer and Zegart, the researchers will design AI agents that could work like digital detectives, following specific steps to comb through documents in multiple languages, still images or videos, and satellite photos to see changes that indicate potential nuclear development in violation of international law.
The second project titled “Comparing Public Opinion in the United States and China” will study how people in both the countries view AI. Under this project principal investigators Michael Tomz, professor of political science, and Diyi Yang, assistant professor of computer science, will build CrossInterviewer, a bilingual AI-powered interviewing tool, and use it to compare public opinion in the United States and China.
According to the Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence StanCrossInterviewer will conduct interviews in both Chinese and English. It will also adapt survey questions based on each individual’s responses, allowing scholars to conduct nuanced, in-depth interviews, previously only possible with human interviewers, at the scale and efficiency of traditional online surveys.
The third project “Studying Agent-Mediated Political Action” will examine how AI agents could influence political and policymaking processes. AI agents are increasingly being used to perform tasks such as generating public comments and processing large numbers of policy submissions. Government agencies could also use AI agents to summarize these submissions before a human makes a decision.
Researchers said these systems often involve multiple AI agents working in a chain, with one agent reading or building on the output of another rather than a single AI model operating independently.
The project will examine whether the country where an AI model was developed can affect the information and conclusions produced by these agent systems.
The institute mentioned that by using closed U.S.-China trade dockets as a test case, Jennifer Pan, professor of communication, and Sanmi Koyejo, associate professor of computer science, will examine how model provenance affects what agent teams produce and what survives that summarization step.
They will also release a public dataset of political-task agents with their underlying models identified, offering a first look at which foundation models are actually being deployed in this space.
The findings will speak to debates over sovereign AI, open-weight governance, and whether provenance disclosure should be required in government and political applications.
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