The number of publications in life, physical and Earth sciences that mention AI grew by a factor of almost 30 from 2010 to 2025.Credit: 4kodiak/Getty
In an indication of how quickly scientists are embracing artificial intelligence, the number of publications in the natural sciences that mention AI grew by almost 30-fold from 2010 to 2025, according to an influential annual state-of-the-field report.
The proportion of publications in any given natural-sciences field that mention AI ranges from 6% to 9% (see ‘AI paper boom’), according to the Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2026, released today by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI at Stanford University in California1.
“Scientists have really embraced this AI era,” says computer scientist Yolanda Gil at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who led this year’s index report (see ‘Fun AI facts’).
Source: Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2026
Alongside the boom in AI-related science publications, the report also lists a host of newly released science foundation models — AI models that are broadly trained to take on a wide range of tasks, but also specially trained on massive data sets from a specific domain of science.
Many researchers have started to rely on AI ‘agents’ that autonomously carry out actions including scientific workflows, but the report is sceptical about their performance. AI agents still struggle to reliably perform multistep workflows, it reports, with the best AI agents scoring roughly half as well as human specialists with PhDs. “Agents are wonderful, but we are still far from a place where we understand how to use them effectively,” says Gil.
Growing numbers
The report says that in 2025, more than 80,000 papers, preprints and other types of publication in the natural sciences — which includes life, physical and Earth sciences — mentioned AI, 26% more than in 2024. The subcategory of physical sciences had the largest number of publications that mention AI (33,000). The Earth sciences category had the highest percentage (9%).
How AI agents will change research: a scientist’s guide
The boom in AI-related science papers is “not surprising”, says computer scientist Arvind Narayanan at Princeton University in New Jersey, who was not involved with creating the index. But it’s not clear, he says, whether the rise of AI use is productive for science. “Whether or not this explosive growth is meaningful is hotly debated,” Narayanan says. “My view is that it is happening too fast, without giving scientific norms time to adjust, and so the quality of research has taken a nosedive.”
Gil says there isn’t much evidence yet that AI is improving scientists’ productivity. “The studies are limited,” she says. But, she adds, scientists “can’t live without it. If you took AI away from them, there would be a riot. So it must be helping in some way.”
Top models
As uptake has grown, so has the number of AI platforms available to researchers. This past year saw the emergence of many science foundation models, including the first one for astronomy, AION-1, which was trained on more than 200 million celestial objects. This training helps it to classify galaxies or estimate their properties. “When I talked to scientists in 2024 and said ‘There’s foundation models for science’, scientists would not know what that means. They didn’t know they existed. I think we have seen that really advance very quickly,” says Gil.
