Stanford HAI just published its 2026 AI Index and it is one of those reports that forces you to sit down and rethink what you thought you knew. AI has reached more than half the world’s population faster than the PC or the internet ever did, but the public mood around it is dark. Trust is at record lows, entry level workers are getting squeezed out, and the gap between what insiders think and what everyone else feels has never been wider.
Here are the numbers that stopped me:
Almost three quarters of AI experts say they are optimistic about the technology’s impact on jobs. Only 23% of the public agrees. That is the widest expert to public gap the Index has ever recorded.
The US builds most of the world’s frontier AI but sits at number 24 in actually using it, with just 28.3% adoption. Singapore, the UAE, and most of Southeast Asia are ahead. The country leading the research is not leading the deployment.
China has almost closed the gap on top benchmarks. The best US model is ahead by just 2.7%. Meanwhile, AI researchers relocating to the US dropped 89%, a staggering reversal of what used to be a one way flow of talent.
And on jobs, developer employment for people aged 22 to 25 fell nearly 20% since 2024. Older engineers kept their seats, the junior ones did not. Company surveys say the cuts are going to accelerate.
The report is over 400 pages. These are only a handful of the data points, but they paint a picture of a technology moving faster than the society around it can metabolise.
why it matters
These are just a few of the countless interesting stats in the 400+ page report. The expert-public divide is a timely stat, given the current anti-AI climate playing out in scary ways. AI insiders see a productivity boom, but regular people aren’t buying it, and just 31% of Americans trust the government to manage the changes.