AI Reports · Stanford HAI · 2026-10-30 · Policy position
The World Model and Spatial Intelligence Era: Governing AI Beyond Language | Stanford HAI
This brief highlights the emergence of world models and sets out a first-of-its-kind governance and policy agenda for the technology. World models build a working representation of an environment to predict how it changes in response to action, and could lower the cost of high-quality simulation. However, no existing benchmark gives policymakers an adequate basis to evaluate them for safety-critical deployment, and closing that gap requires public investment in measurement science.