n an indication of how quickly scientists are embracing artificial intelligence, the number of publications in the natural sciences that mention AI grew by almost 30-fold from 2010 to 2025, according to an influential annual state-of-the-field report.
The proportion of publications in any given natural-sciences field that mention AI ranges from 6% to 9% (see ‘AI paper boom’), according to the Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2026, released today by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI at Stanford University in California1.
“Scientists have really embraced this AI era,” says computer scientist Yolanda Gil at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who led this year’s index report (see ‘Fun AI facts’).
Alongside the boom in AI-related science publications, the report also lists a host of newly released science foundation models — AI models that are broadly trained to take on a wide range of tasks, but also specially trained on massive data sets from a specific domain of science.
Many researchers have started to rely on AI ‘agents’ that autonomously carry out actions including scientific workflows, but the report is sceptical about their performance. AI agents still struggle to reliably perform multistep workflows, it reports, with the best AI agents scoring roughly half as well as human specialists with PhDs. “Agents are wonderful, but we are still far from a place where we understand how to use them effectively,” says Gil.
To read more, click here.