Russ Altman

Russ Altman is the Kenneth Fong Professor at Stanford University, with appointments in bioengineering, genetics, medicine, biomedical data science, and computer science by courtesy. A senior fellow at Stanford HAI, his work focuses on applying AI, data science, and biomedical informatics to medicine, pharmacogenomics, drug action, and precision health.

Mental Health AI Is Scaling Before Its Safety Framework Is Settled

At Stanford’s 2026 AI for Mental Health symposium, Russ Altman, Jina Suh and OpenAI’s Sara Johansen treated mental-health AI as a deployment problem already underway, not a speculative research agenda. Suh argued that general-purpose AI systems are now part of a public-health surface and should be evaluated across users’ full journeys, including consent, referrals, aftermath and the labor pushed onto clinicians, crisis lines, families and reviewers. Johansen described OpenAI’s effort to manage that risk through layered model and product policies that route people toward human support, while acknowledging the difficulty of doing so at platform scale.

Stanford HAIJun 8, 202614 min read