The Cornell AI Initiative aims to advance Cornell as a world leader in ethical and human‑centered AI, and empower Cornell to meet the opportunities and challenges of AI across university research, education, operations, and public engagement.

We welcome feedback from faculty, students, and staff to ensure this mission reflects Cornell’s full breadth of expertise and perspectives.

The Cornell AI Initiative is a university-wide effort to advance Cornell’s leadership in artificial intelligence (AI) research and education, while creating, applying, and evaluating responsible, human-centered AI as a tool across the university — from classrooms and laboratories to clinics and university administration. By leveraging Cornell’s breadth of expertise, the Cornell AI Initiative is committed to understanding how AI affects learning, scholarship, operations, and public engagement, and to advancing responsible strategies for AI use — and intentional non-use — in service of Cornell’s mission.

AI at Cornell is both a field of study and a powerful tool that influences how we conduct research, teach, and support the university. The university's approach to AI is rooted in its wide-ranging scholarship and leadership in AI research. Few institutions can match the combination of computing researchers developing foundational AI algorithms, social scientists examining AI’s impact on individuals and society, humanists grappling with ethics and creativity, policymakers and lawyers developing frameworks for society, and domain experts — from materials scientists to veterinarians to educational researchers — advancing learning, discovery, and creative practice in their fields through AI. This depth and diversity positions Cornell to lead with clarity and purpose, enabling the university to shape and guide the future of AI.

Cornell strives to serve as a model of responsible, future‑focused leadership in higher education and beyond through careful experimentation and evidence-based practices. By empowering innovation by faculty, staff, and students, cultivating judgment, and creating an environment where new ideas can emerge, be tested, and grow, Cornell seeks transformative advances in AI research, education, application, and understanding while also supporting efforts to anticipate and mitigate potential negative impacts of AI. This includes a commitment to transparency in how Cornell’s AI strategy aligns with the university’s sustainability goals and long-term priorities.

In pursuit of its vision to serve as a leader in how universities advance the responsible development and use of AI, the Cornell AI Initiative grounds its strategy in the following guiding principles:

• Pursue an ethical and human-centered approach to AI that places human needs and relationships first
• Advance balanced and evidence-based strategies that recognize and respond to AI opportunities, challenges, and harms
• Empower faculty, staff, and students in their responsible use of AI to enable community-driven and agile experimentation that adapts to the rapidly changing landscape of AI
• Leverage Cornell’s scholarship to shape AI strategy, and enable the use of AI to continually inform and strengthen that scholarship

Rooted in Cornell’s mission, vision, and values, these principles reflect a responsible approach that cultivates judgment, enables lifelong learning, supports staff in their professional development, and considers the environmental, personal, societal, economic, and labor implications of AI. Furthermore, the Cornell AI Initiative is committed to supporting our campus community — including the Ithaca campus, Cornell Tech, and Weill Cornell Medicine — as the driver of responsible, community-led AI innovation.

These principles provide guidance for the Cornell AI Initiative’s goals across four pillars — research, education, operations, and engagement — recognizing that AI cuts across each of these pillars and requires coordinated action. In particular, each pillar brings distinct resources and strengths for achieving the goals in the other pillars:

• Research provides the depth of expertise that informs and amplifies the work of the other pillars.
• Education builds AI literacy and fluency for students, faculty, staff, alumni, and the public.
• Operations enables responsible deployment and experimentation by providing secure platforms and development capabilities.
• Cornell’s external engagement channels carry Cornell’s vision for AI beyond the university, in alignment with our land-grant mission.

By coordinating across these pillars, the Cornell AI Initiative mobilizes expertise, infrastructure, and public-impact pathways that few other institutions can match, positioning Cornell as a leader and model for how universities advance the responsible development and use of AI.

We recognize that AI influences Cornell’s research mission in two fundamental ways. First, Cornell advances the state-of-the-art in research related to AI, drawing on expertise from disciplines across the university. Second, AI is a powerful tool that accelerates breakthroughs and innovation, while also introducing new challenges for research integrity and scholarly practice. This sets the following two goals as part of the mission of the Cornell AI Initiative.

Advance Cornell’s Leadership in AI Research: Cornell is committed to strengthening and expanding its established leadership in AI research to shape and drive the development and practice of AI for a sustainable future, envisioning AI that meaningfully and ethically serves humanity. Our research vision is focused on three interlinked areas: advancing foundational algorithmic capabilities in machine learning, reasoning, perception, language, and actuation; informing socio-technical practice and design by connecting technical development with ethics and humanistic perspectives, law and policy, social science, cognition, and design; and pursuing cross-disciplinary research in application impact areas that span society and institutions, autonomous systems, scientific discovery, health and medicine, and arts and culture. To support this vision, the Cornell AI Initiative 1) facilitates collaborations across disciplines to strengthen reciprocal pathways between AI scholarship and application, 2) fosters scholarly communities of practice as collaborative ecosystems for shared inquiry and innovation in AI research, 3) advances AI computing infrastructure to drive breakthrough research across fields, and 4) provides strategic guidance and support in identifying funding sources and proposal development for center-scale grants that position Cornell as a leader in AI research.

Support Responsible Integration of AI into Research Methodology: AI is transforming research methodologies and offers profound opportunities to accelerate discovery, while also posing challenges to research integrity and rigor, particularly through the spread of low-quality, AI-generated content. Cornell recognizes the need to support researchers exploring these opportunities responsibly while mitigating associated risks. With a strong commitment to research excellence, the Cornell AI Initiative affirms that faculty experimentation and judgment are central to developing new research methodologies. We also acknowledge that disciplines are affected differently by AI and that norms and standards must reflect these disciplinary distinctions. Our activities include providing research infrastructure and AI tools that meet Cornell's standards for security and privacy; creating opportunities for community dialogue to collectively examine AI's impact on research methodology across disciplines; and developing and updating policies to guide responsible use of AI in research and compute infrastructure.

Similar to research, AI impacts education both as a subject and as a tool. As a subject, understanding the affordances of AI and its responsible use is becoming increasingly relevant for how students are expected to practice their professions. Cornell recognizes its responsibility to educate students in AI, but also to offer faculty, staff, and the broader public opportunities to deepen their knowledge of AI. At the same time, AI influences not only what we teach, but also how we teach — creating new opportunities while raising significant challenges for educational integrity and effectiveness. To address AI as a subject and as a tool in education, we set the following two goals:

Promote AI Literacy and Facilitate AI Curricular Efforts: AI literacy is essential for empowering faculty, staff, students, and the wider public to engage effectively and responsibly with AI technologies. The Cornell AI Initiative expands opportunities for AI education across and beyond Cornell, ensuring learning opportunities are aligned with the needs and interests of different audiences. In partnership with Cornell’s academic units and following an "AI in the disciplines" approach, we support and encourage undergraduate and graduate curricular efforts that strengthen and promote field-specific engagements with AI across its technical, ethical, and societal dimensions. These efforts position AI literacy and fluency as tools for individual growth and empowerment, as well as pathways for meaningful public engagement aligned with Cornell’s mission.

Guide the Use of AI in Teaching and Learning: To this end, the Cornell AI Initiative follows seven core principles: maintaining the integrity of the faculty-student relation; committing to experimentation, evidence, and learning from experience; upholding the centrality of faculty judgment and expertise; responding to real student needs and uses; recognizing both AI "goods" and "harms"; respecting institutional and disciplinary heterogeneity; and extending and renewing Cornell's core mission and values. Guided by these principles, we promote the thoughtful, balanced, and evidence-based use of AI tools in teaching and learning, while addressing challenges to academic integrity and effectiveness posed by the rapid transformations in AI.

Regarding university operations, AI also functions both as a subject of activity and as a tool for strengthening how the university works. As a tool, AI offers the potential to improve administrative and operational effectiveness by reducing routine burdens. Delivering on this promise requires faculty- and staff-driven experimentation, a long-term commitment to supporting the professional development of our staff as work evolves, and resources for responsibly developing the tools and practices that advance Cornell’s mission and excellence. This leads to the following two goals:

Improve Cornell’s Administrative Effectiveness: The Cornell AI Initiative aims to strengthen administrative and operational work through the thoughtful use of AI to support human judgment, reduce routine burdens, and free faculty and staff to focus on the relational and creative work central to Cornell’s mission. Through human‑centered design and staff‑driven innovation, those closest to the work identify useful applications and shape solutions that genuinely improve experience for students, faculty, staff, alumni, and communities. This approach includes staff in decisions of when and how they use AI, ensuring transparency, accountability, privacy, security, inclusion, and appropriate human oversight so that AI enhances effectiveness while sustaining trust and institutional responsibility.

Enable AI Innovation, Experimentation, and Deployment: We empower Cornell faculty and staff to develop AI tools for research, education, operations, and public engagement, drawing on their expertise to identify beneficial and responsible uses of AI through community-driven experimentation. Through its AI Innovation Hub, the initiative provides the Cornell community with resources and developer expertise to build prototypes and move successful projects into practice. By including students in this effort, they gain real‑world, project‑based learning experiences that support prototype development for university clients. The hub’s efforts include upskilling the workforce for AI-enabled work, providing secure and scalable AI infrastructure and tools, and ensuring responsible governance of AI agents.

As the land-grant university of the State of New York, public engagement is central to Cornell's mission — supported by long-standing channels that serve a broad range of sectors, from farming to K-12 education, and sustainability to public policy. Cornell also reaches the public through its clinical operations in human and veterinary health, where advances in AI have the potential for substantial impact. Finally, partnerships with philanthropy and industry are important for amplifying Cornell’s impact on how AI develops and is deployed. These commitments lead to the following three goals:

Bring AI to Cornell’s Public Engagement Mission: Integrating AI into Cornell's mission, both as a tool and as a topic, will expand our capacity to serve communities while creating reciprocal learning opportunities for students and researchers. The Cornell AI Initiative strengthens Cornell’s public impact by helping assess AI opportunities and risks, offering training and tools, and ensuring that public needs inform AI research and application. We support engagement programs and partners in adopting AI effectively, with attention to access, safety, ethics, governance, and policy. Through engagement, Cornell students and faculty gain practical experience and insights that inform AI research, while public partners benefit from technology-enabled support and innovation. To advance this work, we build on established programs such as The Einhorn Center for Community Engagement, Cornell Cooperative Extension, Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, Public Interest Tech, K-12 outreach, and public health initiatives, as well as connections to local, state, and federal government agencies, and civil society.

Build Strategic Partnerships that Support and Amplify Cornell’s AI Strategy: Strategic partnerships across industry and philanthropy are vital to advancing the Cornell AI Initiative’s mission, providing resources, real-world insights, and opportunities for shared impact. These engagements not only strengthen research and education but also help communicate Cornell’s vision of responsible, human-centered AI. Collaborations provide partners early access to cutting-edge, cross-disciplinary research, while giving Cornell researchers new perspectives on real-world needs. Partnerships also support recruiting pipelines through internships, fellowships, and student projects, and enhance public visibility and reach via joint events, publications, and showcases. By cultivating relationships with companies and foundations, Cornell strengthens its influence on AI’s future and aligns external engagement with our values and mission.

Advance AI Through Clinical Engagement in Health Care: Cornell’s clinical enterprise, particularly in health care, provides a direct interface between the university and the public. In this setting, AI systems directly influence medical decisions in real time, which requires AI to meet high standards of safety, trust, and transparency. As a result, health care is an important setting for evaluating and improving human-centered AI. In this context, the Cornell AI Initiative supports the thoughtful integration of AI into translational research from bench to bedside, as well as patient care by supporting approaches that complement clinical judgment, respect workflows, and maintain appropriate human oversight while addressing ethical, regulatory, and societal considerations. Clinical practice also provides important feedback for research and implementation. Insights from real-world care, where questions of bias, generalizability, usability, and trust arise, inform the development, evaluation, and governance of systems across Cornell, ensuring it remains accountable to the people it serves.