Stanford grads grapple with AI's promise and peril at commencement

Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, walked onto the Stanford Stadium stage on a Saturday in late June knowing he was stepping into a minefield. The graduates sitting before him had been warned by their peers: do not talk about artificial intelligence. It was the one thing, above all else, that would provoke them. Pichai made a joke about it anyway—a light remark about the advice he'd received, a quip about the last two letters of his surname. Within moments, at least two hundred students stood up and walked out.

Some carried signs. "ICE Spies With Google AI" read one, referencing the company's contracts with immigration enforcement and the Israeli military. Others waved Palestinian flags. The walkout was the most visible expression of a deeper fracture running through Stanford's graduating class of 2026—a generation entering the world at the exact moment artificial intelligence is reshaping it, and they are profoundly, irreconcilably divided about what that means.

Stanford is not just any university. It sits in the heart of Silicon Valley, a place the school itself helped create. Google, Meta, and Apple all have headquarters within fifteen miles of campus. The term "artificial intelligence" was coined here by computer scientist John McCarthy decades ago. Larry Page and Sergey Brin built Google as Stanford PhD students. Fei-Fei Li, known as the Godmother of AI, teaches here. Sam Altman, who co-founded OpenAI, dropped out in 2005. For generations, a Stanford degree has been a golden ticket into the tech industry. A four-year education costs nearly four hundred thousand dollars, but for those admitted—fewer than four percent of applicants—it has meant access to a world of opportunity that few institutions can match.

Yet even here, in the epicenter of technological innovation, the backlash was inescapable. Ifdita Hasan, a computer science and AI major, spoke with optimism about the field. She saw AI as a tool for discovery, a technology people should learn to adapt to rather than fear. She was not surprised by the walkouts, she said. Early pessimism always accompanies emerging technologies. The internet faced the same resistance. But Atash Heil, an Earth Systems major focused on environmental science, felt something closer to dread. He had recently visited an exhibition of art created by artificial intelligence. The experience unsettled him. "I want art to be made by humans," he said. "That's what makes it art, right?" What frightened him most was not the technology itself but the speed of its arrival and the uncertainty of what an AI-dominated future would actually look like.

The practical anxieties were just as real. A study from Stanford published in November found that employment for early-career workers in fields most exposed to AI—software development chief among them—has substantially declined. Rumors, unsubstantiated but persistent, circulated on social media claiming that even Stanford's elite computer science students were struggling to find jobs. The university declined to release placement statistics. Most of the graduates interviewed by the BBC either had positions lined up or planned to continue their studies, but the anxiety was palpable. Lucy Zimmerman, a computer science major who worked as a teaching assistant, had noticed a stark difference between the work students submitted from home, often aided by AI tools, and their performance on proctored exams. Some classes had begun reintroducing supervised testing and spoken-word assessments to prevent cheating. "I'm worried about future generations," she said, "and for my generation." Yet she was heading to a software engineering job at a tech startup in San Francisco. "I'm right in the thick of it," she said.

Colbey Harlan, a psychology major, had used AI for creative writing and found it helpful in overcoming the paralysis that sometimes accompanied his ADHD. But he too carried reservations. The environmental cost troubled him—the energy demands of data centers, the resources consumed in training these systems. "AI is cool," he said, "but can we just stop progressing it? Because if we continue, things are going to get out of control." Harry Kaplan, studying Management Science and Engineering, felt caught between pride in Stanford's legacy and uncertainty about his own future. "It's too early to tell" what impact AI would have on him, he said, holding an inflatable palm tree as students prepared for the university's "Wacky Walk" graduation tradition. "It feels like we're at the edge of something."

When Pichai finished his remarks and walked away from the podium, he did not respond to questions about the walkout. One student who had left the ceremony but asked not to be named spoke to the deeper grievance: "His presence represents what this political climate is empowering, and who is benefiting from the AI race. We cannot relate to him at all." Some of those who walked out joined an alternative ceremony led by Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist who had drawn international attention after immigration agents attempted to deport him despite his legal permanent resident status. Stanford had seen similar protests at its graduations in 2024 and 2025.

Yet even amid the skepticism, some saw possibility. Atash Heil, moving to New Orleans to work on climate resilience, believed AI could help predict how the climate would change, could train models that might actually solve some of the problems the technology itself was creating. He felt privileged to have grown up without AI, to have had to use his own mind. But he was bracing for a future that would be defined by it. "I'm young," he said. "It's going to take up most of my lifetime."