Loyal Agents at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab: Research Assistant Opportunities
The Stanford Digital Economy Lab is looking for research assistants with excellent analytical and organizational skills and outstanding academic credentials to support the Loyal Agents project. Please note that the position is open to Stanford students ONLY. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. Please allow 4-6 weeks processing time after the form is submitted. You can apply here. Please apply with your Stanford email.
Hours: 10-20 hrs/week during school year, 30-40 hrs/week summer
Salary: $25-29/hr, based on skills and experience.
Application Requirement: Submit the application above with your resume.
EDUCATION & EXPERIENCE REQUIREMENTS:
- Senior, co-term, or graduate-level Stanford student.
- Work, research, or internship experience providing both quantitative and qualitative research support, and/or project coordination experience preferred.
- Proficiency with R or Python is required.
- Creative research skills and strong writing skills are essential.
- Knowledge of and keen interest in AI desired.
CORE DUTIES:
Support the ongoing research activities associated with the Loyal Agents initiative through our projects, including:
- Benchmarking & Evaluation – Loyalty sandboxes, an open agent-rating service, and MemoryArena test whether agents live up to their claims.
- Human Context Protocol and Portable Memory – An open standard for portable, user-governed personal context that can move across AI systems rather than remain locked inside one platform, and approaches to portable memory that are provably loyal to user intent.
- Authentication for AI Agents – Authorization primitives suited to non-deterministic agentic systems, preserving clear permission boundaries, accountability, and auditability.
- Duty of Loyalty – Legal and technical frameworks translating duties of care and loyalty into concrete agent design and deployment practices.
You’ll join a small, cross-disciplinary team at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab working with Consumer Reports and partners across industry and civil society. The work is applied: our research ships as open benchmarks, public-domain standards and working prototypes that companies and policymakers use.
Click here to applyAbout the Loyal Agents initiative
AI agents are fast becoming the layer through which people find information, make decisions and spend money. Loyal Agents, a research collaboration between the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and Consumer Reports, works to ensure those agents serve the people who rely on them rather than the platforms that deploy them.
The initiative brings together economists, computer scientists, legal scholars and consumer advocates. Its work spans four areas: the legal duty of loyalty an agent owes its user; secure identity, authentication and authorization so agents can act on a person’s behalf; benchmarks that test whether agents actually perform and stay aligned with individual preferences; and open standards, including the Human Context Protocol (HCP), that let people carry their own context and memory between agents. Loyal Agents shares its work openly and convenes industry, academia and civil society to build consensus on how loyal-by-design agents should work.
The Stanford Digital Economy Lab is an interdisciplinary research group that studies how digital technologies are transforming work, organizations, and the economy. The Lab focuses on four core areas of research: Economics of Transformative AI, New Measures of the Economy, Digital Platforms and Society, and AI Agents. The Lab’s insights help companies, policymakers, students, and professionals rise to the challenges and opportunities created by digitization.
The Stanford Digital Economy Lab is an initiative of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) and is co-sponsored by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).