What Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models does
The Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM) is an interdisciplinary initiative at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) focused on advancing the study, development, and deployment of foundation models from both technical and societal perspectives. CRFM’s work spans core technical foundations (e.g., data, training, systems, inference, interpretability, evaluation), beneficial foundation-model applications in specialized domains (including law, music, robotics, and biomedicine), and societal impact areas such as transparency, supply chains, openness, copyright, privacy, and systemic risk, as well as AI policy engagement to support evidence-based policymaking across jurisdictions. A flagship CRFM program is the Foundation Model Transparency Index (FMTI), which evaluates foundation-model developers against a structured set of transparency indicators and releases detailed transparency reports.