AI100 report says AI has become a mainstream social force as frontier development concentrates in the US and China

The 2026 AI100 report says artificial intelligence has moved from a specialized technology into everyday use, the Max Planck Society said, whose researcher Iyad Rahwan sat on the study panel. The study is administered by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and reviews technical, ethical, economic, and social changes since its previous report in 2021.

The panel identifies larger datasets and greater computing capacity as the main drivers of generative AI progress during the past five years. It says constraints on data and computing resources are now shifting research toward reasoning and inference-time compute.

The report also covers AI use in science, software, creative work, cybersecurity, and military systems. It finds that frontier model development remains concentrated among a small number of organizations in the United States and China, while AI-generated images, audio, and video have weakened trust in recorded evidence.

AI100 also describes governance as fragmented, with national security playing a larger role in policy. The project began in 2014 and convenes an international panel every five years to assess AI progress and its effects on society.