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Stanford AI report: Model capability accelerating, China has closed the gap with the US

Stanford’s annual AI Index Report says “leading models are now nearly indistinguishable” from each other, and benchmarks used to evaluate them are falling behind their accelerating capabilities.

Jon Keegan

4/13/26 4:40PM

China has closed the gap with the US in the global competition for AI model superiority, and any talk of an AI performance plateau is just flat-out wrong. Those are two big takeaways from this year’s AI Index Report from Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Models are continuing to make impressive leaps in performance, and the pace is accelerating, the 2026 edition of the report finds. But it also carefully examines this rapid acceleration to show that it may not be exactly what it seems.

Last year’s class of AI models have been steadily approaching or surpassing human baseline scores on benchmarks, with AI's ability to operate a computer independently jumping from near zero to above 75% of human performance in a single year.

However, all of the major frontier models are clustered at the top of the benchmark charts together, all separated by just a few points between them. The authors of the report say “leading models are now nearly indistinguishable from one another.”

That could mean that the ecosystem of benchmarks — the yardsticks used to measure the models’ capabilities — may not be keeping pace with the rapidly evolving models’ skills. For example, the report notes that AI models can win a gold medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad, but are hilariously bad at telling the time by reading a clock face.

AI Index 2026 Annual Report chart - China models — Source: 2026 AI Index Report, AI Index Steering Committee, Institute for Human-Centered AI, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, April 2026

And in another worrying sign for its plan to dominate AI, the US has seen a rapid, alarming decline in its ability to attract global AI talent. The Trump administration has added significant new restrictions to the H-1B visa program, which helped lure top AI talent to the US. New requirements such as imposing a $100,000 fee that employers must pay per H-1B hire have resulted in a sharp drop in AI researchers coming to the US.

Net flow of top Al authors and inventors by country, 2010-25 — Source: 2026 AI Index Report, AI Index Steering Committee, Institute for Human-Centered AI, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, April 2026

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

6/17/26

Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

Tom Jones6/17/26

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

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TAKING ACCOUNTS

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Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5