Russell Wald

Confidence 0.80 · 3 sources · last confirmed 2026-05-28

Executive Director of Stanford HAI since 2024 — oversees HAI’s research, education, and outreach missions. Promoted into the role from earlier HAI positions: HAI’s first Director of Policy (2020–2022), then Managing Director for Policy and Society (2022–2024).

Public surface focuses on AI governance and the academia–industry compute gap: at a January 2025 Gates Computer Science Building seminar he argued that academia needs structural reform — including substantial public-compute investment — to remain competitive with frontier labs. The argument runs through several Stanford HAI policy outputs and aligns with the 2026 Index’s widening academia/industry capability gap framing.

Member of the AI Index Steering Committee.

Appears in this wiki via

• 2026-04-28-ai-index-report-2025 — co-author, 8th edition.
• 2026-04-30-ai-index-report-2026 — co-author, 9th edition.
• 2026-05-27-sajadieh-stanford-hai-inside-the-2026-ai-index-report — panel principal at the 27 May 2026 Stanford HAI talk-track; argues the academic-vs-industry transparency tension as a structural risk (frontier-lab proprietary mode hampers academic peer-review/verification); pushes back on the opacity-drives-mistrust framing during the audience Q&A with the halves-and-have-nots observation; argues US-China alignment is structurally necessary for global AI governance.