Hoover’s TPA, Stanford’s HAI Jointly Fund Three New Projects Studying AI and Geopolitics

Hoover’s Technology Policy Accelerator (TPA) and Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence are funding three new research projects that explore how the use of AI can both illuminate and complicate ongoing geopolitical challenges.

Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA)— Hoover’s Technology Policy Accelerator (TPA) and Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence are funding three new research projects that explore how the use of AI can both illuminate and complicate ongoing geopolitical challenges.

As part of Stanford’s seed grants portfolio, HAI and TPA jointly awarded funding of up to $100,000 each to three new research projects that explore nuclear proliferation, public perceptions of AI, and the political differences identifiable in AI agents impact our understanding of AI, and the effect its rise will have on matters of geopolitical significance.

Each proposal comes from an interdisciplinary team including at least one principal investigator from the humanities or social sciences with at least one principal investigator from a technical field.

“AI is rapidly reshaping the geopolitical landscape, but policymakers still lack the research needed to understand where the greatest risks and opportunities lie,” said Amy Zegart, the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and TPA’s director. “These projects bring technical and policy experts together to examine urgent questions about nuclear security, public opinion, and the use of AI in political decision-making. By sparking new collaborations across fields, this partnership will generate rigorous research that can inform policy before the technology moves even further ahead.”

The partnership between both groups began in early 2026, when Stanford’s HAI and Hoover’s TPA formed a new Working Group on AI and Geopolitics to advance an ambitious research agenda focused on issues at the intersection of these two concerns.

The working group’s goal is to develop orienting principles and fund novel research about the most important geopolitical policy challenges impacted by AI. Its participants focus on understanding the potential national and international security, economic, and policy impact of technical breakthroughs that should be anticipated in the coming years.

The working group brings together political scientists and national security experts versed in the geopolitics of AI alongside computer scientists with technical knowledge of the cutting edge of AI development.

The first project to receive joint funding through TPA and HAI, Human-Centered AI for Proliferation Monitoring, will see Mykel Kochenderfer of the School of Engineering’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Zegart, study how interpretable, human-centered AI systems can analyze large-scale, multimodal, open-source data to improve monitoring of nuclear proliferation. A multidisciplinary team will design AI-assisted workflows for two use cases: detecting illicit procurement for nuclear proliferation and identifying undeclared nuclear infrastructure around the world. The workflows draw on large language model–based AI agents and vision language models to integrate multilingual text, online multimedia, and satellite imagery.