AI Reports · Stanford HAI · 2026-10-02 · Survey / index / data
Science | The 2026 AI Index Report | Stanford HAI
This new chapter of the AI Index report examines AI's growing role across scientific fields such as biology, chemistry, physics and astronomy. Natural sciences reached about 80,150 AI publications in 2025, up 26% from 2024, and AI now accounts for 5.8%–8.8% of scientific research output, up from below 1% in 2010. Performance is uneven: the best models beat human expert averages on ChemBench, but frontier models score below 20% on ReplicationBench, the best agent reaches 38.8% on PaperArena versus 83.5% for PhD experts, and models achieve roughly 17% on BixBench.