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Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models

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.

News

Company record

May 26, 2026 · Official · Stanford CRFMHELM Arabic Enterprise

CRFM describes HELM Arabic Enterprise, a leaderboard for transparent, reproducible evaluation of large language models on Arabic-language enterprise benchmarks designed around enterprise use cases (e.g., financial reasoning and legal question answering), developed in collaboration with Arabic.AI and built on HELM evaluation methodology.

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Dec 18, 2025 · Official · Stanford CRFMHELM Arabic

CRFM publishes HELM Arabic, a leaderboard for transparent, reproducible evaluation of LLMs on Arabic language benchmarks produced in collaboration with Arabic.AI, including multiple benchmark components used for evaluation.

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Sep 29, 2025 · Official · Stanford CRFMHELM Long Context

CRFM releases/announces work on HELM Long Context, positioned around evaluating long-context capabilities within the HELM evaluation framework.

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Jun 04, 2025 · Official · Stanford CRFMReliable and Efficient Amortized Model-Based Evaluation

CRFM announces a new approach to reliable and efficient amortized model-based evaluation, described as part of its ongoing HELM evaluation work.

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May 28, 2025 · Official · Stanford CRFMSurprisingly Fast AI-Generated Kernels We Didn’t Mean to Publish (Yet)

CRFM posts about surprisingly fast AI-generated kernels, presented as related work in its broader research engineering and evaluation ecosystem.

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May 21, 2025 · Official · Stanford CRFMBountyBench: Dollar Impact of AI Agent Attackers and Defenders on Real-World Cybersecurity Systems

CRFM publishes BountyBench, described as evaluating the dollar impact of AI agent attackers and defenders on real-world cybersecurity systems.

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Mar 20, 2025 · Official · Stanford CRFMHELM Capabilities: Evaluating LMs Capability by Capability

CRFM publishes HELM Capabilities, emphasizing capability-by-capability evaluation within HELM’s holistic evaluation approach.

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Nov 08, 2024 · Official · Stanford CRFMFoundation Model Transparency Index — 2025 self-assessment/policy updates (third edition context)

CRFM provides updates related to the Foundation Model Transparency Index (FMTI), including plans for subsequent iterations and self-assessment elements.

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Show 4 earlier updates
Nov 08, 2024 · Official · Stanford CRFMHELM Safety: Towards Standardized Safety Evaluations of Language Models

CRFM publishes HELM Safety work focused on standardized safety evaluations of language models.

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Sep 05, 2024 · Official · Stanford CRFMAdvancing Customizable Benchmarking in HELM via Unitxt Integration

CRFM posts about advancing customizable benchmarking in HELM via Unitxt integration.

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May 21, 2024 · Official · Stanford CRFMFoundation Model Transparency Index after 6 months

CRFM reports on early progress and findings after six months related to the Foundation Model Transparency Index.

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May 01, 2024 · Official · Stanford CRFMMassive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) on HELM

CRFM publishes an entry describing Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) evaluation on HELM.

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Source map · 2 recurring channels · 41 references
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Still resolving: Newsroom · Official X

Funding

Latest disclosed valuationNot disclosed
Tracked capital$6.1K5 sourced rounds
DateRoundRaisedValuationLead / investorsEvidence
Feb 18, 2024Grant / program support (third-party funding supporting CRFM research)$2.1K—
Not attributed
+1 investor
Jan 01, 2024Grant / program support (third-party funding supporting CRFM research)$2.1K—
Jul 01, 2022Research support / institutional sponsorship (disclosed as of July 2022)$2K—

What it builds

HELM (Holistic Evaluation of Language Models)

HELM is an open evaluation framework used by CRFM to run transparent, reproducible evaluations across tasks and model capabilities, forming the basis for multiple CRFM leaderboards.

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Levanter (Legible, Scalable, Reproducible Foundation Models with JAX)

Levanter is CRFM’s training framework for transparent and reproducible large-scale language model development (bitwise determinism is highlighted in CRFM’s release).

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HELM Arabic

HELM Arabic is a leaderboard for transparent and reproducible evaluation of Arabic-language model capabilities, produced in collaboration with Arabic.AI and built from multiple Arabic-language benchmark components.

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HELM Arabic Enterprise

HELM Arabic Enterprise is a leaderboard for transparent, reproducible evaluation of large language models on Arabic-language enterprise use cases, developed in collaboration with Arabic.AI and built on HELM’s evaluation methodology (standardized prompting, fully logged requests/responses, and reproducible scoring).

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Foundation Model Transparency Index (FMTI)

FMTI is CRFM’s annual assessment of foundation model developers’ transparency using a structured set of transparency indicators, with the index releasing consolidated transparency report content per participating organization.

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Foundation Model Transparency Reports (as part of FMTI)

FMTI’s transparency reports collect and consolidate developer-submitted information (and, for some companies, CRFM-prepared reports) tied to the index’s transparency indicators.

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Ecosystem Graphs: The Social Footprint of Foundation Models

Ecosystem Graphs is CRFM’s work to document and visualize the foundation-model ecosystem and the different roles and relationships that determine social impact across the lifecycle of models and deployments.

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Milestones & partnerships