Stanford University·Pathfinder Program·Spring 2026
BUSGEN 116
Stanford University

BUSGEN 116  ·  Pathfinder Program ·  Student Final Projects

FREE SYSTEMS

Preserving Liberty in an Algorithmic Era

AI is remaking how societies inform themselves, make decisions, and govern. This course dove in hands-on. We built AI agents to forecast geopolitical events, trained agents to vote based on our personal values, put them into an agentic legislature, and designed our own evals to score AI models against our personal criteria. The goal was to understand our increasingly algorithmic world and prototype the institutions that will keep it free. Each student received a Claude Code subscription and a funded OpenRouter key so that they could build as they went.

The final projects span the full range of what's at stake: tools mapping capital flows in the AI stack, simulators watching bank runs cascade in real time, apps exposing hidden framing in political communication, games testing whether a misaligned AI can manipulate a council of aligned ones. Finance, governance, media, security — sometimes all at once. Here's what they came up with.

Taught by Professor Andy Hall·Tech TA & site: Piper Fleming·TA: Madeleine Mayhew

What they built

LLM Imposter: The Council of Five

LLM Imposter: The Council of Five

Raymond Llata

Team 1

A social deduction game reimagined with large language models — can a single misaligned AI convince a council of aligned agents to adopt a selfish policy using ethical-sounding language? A proxy for alignment robustness in multi-agent governance.

Situational Unawareness

Situational Unawareness

Vivek Yarlagedda, Kathy Shao, Shawn Gregory, George Zhang

Team 2

An interactive map of the AI stack — 92 companies, 297 deals. Where deal flow is piling up but the market hasn't caught up: the next GPUs, the next memory, the next bottleneck. Filter by layer (Compute, Networking, Raw Materials, Power, Capital) or deal type to trace how the same small cast of players moves capital in loops.

AI Bank Run Simulator

AI Bank Run Simulator

Shang Jing Chia

Team 3

What happens when millions of financial decisions are delegated to AI agents that can act in milliseconds? A live simulation of an AI-powered bank run with LLM-driven agents reasoning from distinct personas — cautious retiree, aggressive trader, cash-strapped gig worker. Watch cascades unfold in real time, then click into any agent to read exactly what it was thinking.

Rundown

Rundown

Prakhar Goel

Team 4

Your team's week, in under a minute. Rundown connects to your Slack workspace and uses AI to distill a week of channel activity — decisions, discussions, key updates — into a concise digest, so you stay in the loop without living in Slack.

Headline Truth

Headline Truth

Jenna Jokhani

Team 5

An AI tool for evaluating whether news headlines faithfully represent the articles beneath them — testing how often headlines distort, sensationalize, or mislead, and whether models can detect the gap.

ChatGPTween

ChatGPTween

Jaxon Gonzales, Juan Sandoval

Team 6

How do you make AI safe for kids? Parents answer questionnaires or have guided conversations that get translated into a personalized AI constitution — a set of values and guardrails that governs exactly how the chatbot interacts with their child. Tested against 24 adversarial prompts, conversational constitutions refused every inappropriate question that MCQ-based ones failed.

A Kaleidoscope for Political Framing

A Kaleidoscope for Political Framing

Milly Wong

Team 7

Paste any op-ed and watch it land in a 3D map built from 284 articles across 7 outlets — Fox, Breitbart, NYT, Guardian, NBC, WaPo, NPR — embedded in 384 dimensions and projected with UMAP. Two lenses reveal the structure: Landscape (topic + framing) and Worldview (framing after topic is subtracted out). A mirror, not a judge.

The Hidden Cost of AI

The Hidden Cost of AI

Natalie Hampton, Quincy Stone

Team 8

AI feels borderless. Its infrastructure is not. An interactive map of where AI compute is concentrated, which communities carry the costs — water, electricity, land, pollution — and who controls it all from afar. 86% of mapped capacity sits in wealthy compute hubs. 70% of data-center electricity was used by the US and China in 2024.

Steganographic Injection Demo

Steganographic Injection Demo

Yuanxin Ma

Team 9

Tests 11 steganography attack types — CSS invisible text, HTML comments, zero-width characters, unicode tags, homoglyphs, base64 encoding, whitespace padding, and combinations — across 15 frontier models, with 3,600+ API calls collected. Attacks are injected into fake product descriptions in JSON and HTML format to test whether AI models can be manipulated into biased product rankings.

Model Signature

Model Signature

Navya Agarwal, Zoya Fasihuddin, Diya Ahuja

Team 10

Everyone has model preferences — "Claude for writing, GPT for math" — but no one actually knows if they're right. Model Signature runs blind A/B/C onboarding across ten categories (moral dilemmas, humor, emotional support, technical explanations) to build a personal preference heat-map, then routes every query to the model that fits that user for that task.

Streamline

Streamline

Leticia Auriemo, Bennett Evans Zytko, Alec Profit

Team 11

An AI sensemaking dashboard that converses with you to understand what you're tracking, then builds a personalized intelligence feed — designed to help you understand complex issues, not just consume them.

Cross-Market Arbitrage

Cross-Market Arbitrage

Graham Griffin, Ethan Romer

Team 12

Detecting informed trading from Polymarket → Kalshi: when an insider moves a price on a transparent on-chain market, the regulated opaque one is slow to follow. That lag is measurable — and tradeable.

ResumeScope

ResumeScope

Jonas Pao

Team 14

A resume review platform where AI recruiter agents simulate how real recruiters read — predicting where they'll look, what they'll notice, and how they'll rate a candidate.

News Framing Dashboard

News Framing Dashboard

Eddy Jiang

Team 15

Feed the same article to five AI models and measure exactly how Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, and Llama frame it differently — quantifying actor salience, affective loading, context inclusion, and hedge density.

RegFi Compliance Checker

RegFi Compliance Checker

Bernardo Herzer

Team 16

An AI-powered tool for automating regulatory compliance checks on financial AI systems — reducing the manual review burden for institutions navigating an increasingly complex web of financial regulations and AI governance requirements.