Elena Cryst

Elena Cryst is director of policy and society at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), where she leads the institute’s work bringing Stanford’s AI research to policymakers in Washington, Sacramento and capitals around the world. She also builds HAI’s collaborations with civil society, philanthropy and social impact leaders so that the concerns of those communities shape how the technology is developed and governed. Her career has been spent turning academic research into public capacity — the same gap CalCompute is designed to close on the compute side.

Cryst was a member of the writing and editing group for The California Report on Frontier AI Policy, the June 2025 report of the Joint California Policy Working Group on AI Frontier Models requested by Gov. Newsom and co-led by Fei-Fei Li, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar and Jennifer Tour Chayes. The report’s recommendations informed the final provisions of SB-53, the law that established CalCompute.

Her policy writing at HAI focuses on the widening resource gap between industry and the public sector. She co-authored “Expanding Academia’s Role in Public Sector AI” (December 2024), an issue brief documenting that companies now hold more than 1,000 times the compute of universities, that nearly 70 percent of new AI Ph.D.s go to the private sector and that industry produced 51 notable machine learning models in 2023 against academia’s 15. The brief argues governments must keep investing in academia’s capacity to do frontier research and train the next generation of AI talent. She is also a co-author of HAI’s 2026 issue brief on world models and spatial intelligence, which calls for broad public access to the technology and public investment in measurement science, and of “AI Sovereignty’s Definitional Dilemma” (February 2026), which urges policymakers to be precise about why and where they want control over the AI stack, from energy and compute up to models and applications. Her 2025 white paper “Mind the (Language) Gap” maps the challenges of building large language models for low-resource languages.

Cryst also oversees HAI’s policymaker education programs, including the annual Congressional Boot Camp on AI for senior House and Senate staff, launched in 2019, and the California State Boot Camp, which trained 35 state policymakers in its 2024 session. Before joining HAI she was deputy director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, where she served as the founding managing editor of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, launched in 2021, and co-authored research on how search engines handle suicide-related queries. Earlier she was director of programs at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, where she launched its predoctoral research fellows program, and held roles at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, including its Cyber Policy Center, Center for International Security and Cooperation and Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

Cryst holds a B.A. with honors in international relations and an M.A. in Latin American studies from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. She is based at Stanford, California.