Stanford business school dean Sarah Soule says frontier AI labs’ resources and data, plus the potential financial upside of working for them, increasingly attract professors. She says Stanford’s AI research costs are also rising and future spending is hard to predict.
Soule said Stanford entered an enterprise agreement with Anthropic over the summer, giving students, faculty and staff access to Claude’s tools. Stanford also has shared computing resources, cloud capacity and research hardware, but advanced AI research needs far more computing than a chatbot subscription, and providing enough capacity is increasingly expensive.
Stanford professors Andrew Hall and Chad Jones are on leave this year; the article does not say they are working for AI labs. OpenAI chief economist Aaron Chatterji is on leave from Duke. Stanford allows tenured faculty two years of unpaid private-sector leave every seven years and says professors often return. The university views industry ties as complementary to its academic mission; Soule said academia may offer more freedom for long-term research without pressure for immediate results.
