TIME names the 100 most influential people in AI for 2026
The fourth annual TIME100 AI list is out, and it reads as a map of where the industry's power has migrated over the past year — from model labs into the compute, chips, and data-center infrastructure that actually sustains them.
TIME's 2026 TIME100 AI list — its fourth — names the 100 people the magazine's editors and reporters judge most influential in shaping artificial intelligence, split across Leaders, Innovators, Shapers, and Thinkers. The Leaders bracket is a roll call of the usual frontier labs: OpenAI's Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and chief research officer Mark Chen; Anthropic co-founders Dario and Daniela Amodei; and Elon Musk, alongside the less-celebrated operators of the physical layer — Broadcom's Hock Tan, Oracle's Larry Ellison, CoreWeave's Michael Intrator, and SMIC co-CEO Liang Mong Song. The inclusion of chipmakers and data-center builders alongside the model labs is the list's quiet thesis: influence in AI is no longer mainly about writing the models, but about controlling the silicon and the power they run on.
The Innovators bracket tilts toward product and applications, with Cursor's Michael Truell, Moonshot AI's Yang Zhilin, OpenEvidence's Daniel Nadler, and Cerebras' Andrew Feldman named — plus actor-filmmaker Ben Affleck, a sign of how far AI's cultural footprint has spread. TIME editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs described the field as increasingly "explosive and divisive," pointing to Musk taking an AI company public, Dario Amodei's clash with the Pentagon, and Ellison's data-center buildout. That framing is the more interesting editorial judgment here: TIME isn't just listing winners, it's noting the fault lines running through the industry.
The most striking through-line is China's expanded presence. ByteDance chairman Liang Rubo, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu, Moonshot's Yang Zhilin, Zhipu CEO Zhang Peng, AgiBot's Deng Taihua, and SMIC's Liang Mong Song all made the cut — an acknowledgment, as Jacobs put it, that Chinese models have begun occasionally outperforming their advanced US counterparts. A list that once would have been a Silicon Valley census now splits influence across two continents.
The Shapers bracket, meanwhile, adds governance voices like ITU secretary-general Doreen Bogdan-Martin and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, co-founder of the Creators Coalition on AI — the labor and policy side of a debate the list otherwise treats as a corporate race.
What to watch: whether any of this year's Thinkers — the researchers and critics — end up as the names that actually define 2027, rather than the executives currently holding the budgets.
Who's missing from this year's TIME100 AI that you'd argue belongs on it? Tell us in the comments.
