Stanford dean says AI labs are competing alongside universities for faculty: 'I won't lie, I concern concerning this'

There's a combat for AI endowment that's playing out in the classroom.

Sarah Soule, the dean of Stanford's Graduate School of Business, told Business Insider that frontier AI labs — alongside their enormous computing resources, data, and coming IPOs — are becoming an increasingly mighty diagram for professors.

"There is an allure for faculty," she stated concerning the trend. "I won't lie, I concern concerning this."

The drag is already apparent at Stanford. Andrew Hall and Chad Jones, two GSB professors, are the two on depart this year.

Stanford isn't the lone university alongside department who have decided to activity at an AI lab. Soule had fair gotten off a community panel alongside Aaron Chatterji, OpenAI's chief economist, who has a "flexible activity arrangement" alongside Duke University's dean of the Fuqua School of Business, a university spokesman told Business Insider.

Stanford lets its tenured department obtain two years of voluntary depart to associate the personal field all seven years. Faculty can obtain longer leaves for authorities service, as the school's erstwhile provost, Condoleezza Rice, did to rotate into the Secretary of State.

Professors frequently arrive rear to the school, the University told Business Insider. Westley Hartmann, who has taught at Stanford since 2003, took seven months of voluntary depart to activity for Amazon.

Still, the trend comes as AI labs continue to substantially fortify their recruiting hand. Leading AI labs continue to amass capital, computing power, and market influence. Working inner one can recommendation researchers a chance to form a innovation alongside enormous financial and social consequences — and, potentially, portion in its financial upside.

Stanford stated it does not perspective department collaborations or industry leaves as zero-sum losses. The university described them as part of a broader ecosystem that can assistance professors remain near to scientific betterment and bring those experiences rear into their research, teaching, and activity alongside students.

"There's no inquiry that the chance to activity alongside frontier AI labs is appealing to faculty," Kristin Harlan, the caput of dean's communications for Stanford's GSB, said. "We see those relationships as complementary to Stanford's scholarly mission, not distinct from it."

Soule stated academia motionless offers item the labs cannot: liberty to prosecute long-term investigation without the identical force for contiguous results.

"I doubtful that the liberty to do what you desire to do and to obtain a extremely lengthy period to do it volition be perchance item that won't be the case at the frontier labs," she said.

Keeping up is expensive

AI is additionally adding a prosperity issue for schools.

Stanford University entered into an endeavor accord alongside Anthropic complete the summer, Soule said, giving students, faculty, and personnel admission to Claude's suite of tools. Stanford additionally has shared computing resources, haze capacity, and hardware investments for research.

Researchers doing the most advanced AI activity frequently need far additional than a chatbot subscription, and providing adequate computing power is getting increasingly expensive.

Soule stated Stanford's AI-related investigation expenses are rising, during forthcoming spending is "super difficult to forecast." Frontier labs, meanwhile, can recommendation the enormous compute and data resources that university leaders are struggling to match.

"I don't have a fine answer for it," she stated concerning the expanding budgets. "Probably, most deans and most university presidents are really concerned concerning this issue, since it's really daunting to think about."

Update September 28, 2026 — This narrative has been updated to indicate particulars of Aaron Chatterji's activity institution alongside Duke University.