“AI Is a Societal Choice”: hessian.AI Founding Member Iryna Gurevych Co-Authors Stanford’s One Hundred Year Study on AI (AI100)
Long-term study led from Stanford takes stock of progress in Artificial Intelligence
How is AI changing society, and who decides how it develops? The new report of the long-term study “AI100” addresses these questions. Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych, Professor of Computer Science at TU Darmstadt and founding member of hessian.AI, co-authored it as a member of an international expert panel.
Iryna Gurevych played a key role in a renowned international study on the development of Artificial Intelligence. As one of three researchers from Germany, she served on the twelve-member panel that wrote the latest report of the “One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence” (AI100), published on 10 November 2026. The study is led by an international expert committee and administered by Stanford University. Following the reports of 2016 and 2021, this is the third report of the long-term study, which has been running since 2014. It is titled “AI Goes Mainstream: The Scaling Era and the Rise of Generative AI”.
Every five years, a newly convened AI100 panel takes stock of the current state of AI. This time, twelve researchers from computer science, philosophy and sociology examined the period since 2021, chaired by Professor Michael Wooldridge of the University of Oxford. “I am proud that TU Darmstadt, hessian.AI and ATHENE are part of an initiative with such a long-term perspective,” said Gurevych.
The public has had little influence on AI development so far
According to Gurevych, the report’s key findings include that frontier AI is concentrated among very few players, mainly in the US and China. High-quality data is becoming scarce and training costs prohibitive, and the public has barely been involved so far. “Billions of people are affected by AI, but so far they have had little say in how it is developed and deployed,” Gurevych explained. “As a panel, we strongly urge governments and providers to treat the direction of AI as a collective societal choice, not a technological inevitability.”
About Iryna Gurevych
Iryna Gurevych is one of the most internationally recognised experts in Artificial Intelligence and computational linguistics. Since 2007, she has been researching and teaching at the Department of Computer Science at TU Darmstadt, where she heads the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab and holds the ATHENE Distinguished Professorship for Cybersecurity. She is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the Academia Europaea. In 2021, she became the first woman to receive a LOEWE Top Professorship from the State of Hesse. In 2025, she was awarded the prestigious Milner Award of the Royal Society, the first professor at a German university to receive it. Her work on the AI100 report was funded by the ERC Advanced Grant “InterText”.
Gurevych is Deputy Spokesperson of TU Darmstadt’s research field Information and Intelligence (I+I), whose profile topics are Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Complex Interconnected Systems, and Cybersecurity and Privacy. She is also a member of the I+I Steering Committee. Through the UKP Lab and other activities, she contributes her expertise in Artificial Intelligence, natural language processing (NLP), large language models and disinformation detection to the research field.
In addition, Gurevych is a member of the Cluster of Excellence “Reasonable Artificial Intelligence” (RAI) and a founding member and Principal Investigator at hessian.AI.
