Social Science, Supercharged

AI capabilities are advancing fast. Can social science keep up? Through a fast grants program launched in 2026, Stanford Impact Labs seeks to support novel uses of frontier AI tools that dramatically accelerate the speed, quality, or relevance of social science research in ways that can ultimately benefit society. This fast grants program is intended to generate proof points for how AI can help shape disciplines and expand the public value of social science.

We invite proposals from Stanford faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and PhD students for projects that use frontier AI tools to dramatically improve impact-focused social science research. We are intentionally keeping this call broad. Illustrative examples of eligible projects include those focused on:

• New data: using AI to unlock, structure, or analyze new forms of data relevant to social sciences
• New methods: using AI to improve how social scientists generate, test, or synthesize knowledge
• New research architectures: rethinking how social science research is organized and executed, including the use of agentic systems to manage all or part of research workflows (e.g. AI as co-scientist)
• Improved institutions: using AI to improve the institutions and processes through which social science is produced, evaluated, reviewed, replicated, translated, or used.

We’re also open to ideas that fall outside these examples, but otherwise dramatically improve the public value of social science. Because AI is advancing faster than most research timelines, we are equally interested in proposals that take advantage of today’s capabilities as we are in those that account for a world where AI is dramatically more capable than it is today. 

To learn more, please review our FAQ.