Editorial Team
7 min read
TIME’s fourth TIME100 AI names 100 people across four categories, from model and infrastructure executives to labor leaders, regulators and researchers. Its undisclosed selection process makes the list an editorial map of who can shape AI’s deployment—not a measured ranking of technical impact.
TIME, the magazine that publishes the annual list, says its fourth TIME100 AI identifies 100 people shaping artificial intelligence worldwide. The selection spans OpenAI and Anthropic executives, chip and data-center leaders, health and court technology founders, a union president, a U.S. senator and artists campaigning over synthetic media.
Ayesha Javed, a TIME senior editor, led this year’s selection with the magazine’s journalists and contributors over several months. The methodology account says editors chose people who best represented the year’s AI storylines and, in their judgment, had the most influence. It publishes no score, benchmark, weighting or reproducible threshold.
That limitation changes what the list can establish. It is a curated account of where TIME believes authority sits, not evidence that one honoree exerted more measurable influence than another. The full roster identifies each person’s current job and groups them into four categories.
The Leaders include OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman; SpaceX CEO Elon Musk; Anthropic co-founders Dario and Daniela Amodei; IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna; Google DeepMind Chief AI Readiness Officer Lila Ibrahim; and ByteDance Chairman and CEO Liang Rubo. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, Oracle co-founder, CTO and executive chairman Larry Ellison, CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator and SMIC co-CEO Liang Mong Song represent the chips and computing capacity required to run large systems.
TIME’s introduction describes the conflicts behind those choices: Musk taking leading AI firms to public markets; Dario Amodei’s dispute with the Pentagon over military use; Ellison’s data-center buildout; and Moonshot AI co-founder and CEO Yang Zhilin’s Chinese models occasionally outperforming advanced U.S. competitors. A report on the selection describes Musk’s xAI–SpaceX merger and the combined company’s public offering. Those are different kinds of leverage—capital, state access, infrastructure and technical performance—not a common unit of achievement.
The roster’s Shapers make the political and social contest explicit. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders told TIME, “The bottom line is, I think we have to stop the development of superintelligence.” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler has led the labor federation’s response to workplace AI and founded its Technology Institute in 2021. In the federation’s announcement, it says unions have won contract protections and are pressing for safeguards in Congress and state legislatures.
Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, co-founder of the Creators Coalition on AI, is included for advocating creator protections and shared standards. Paris Hilton is listed for work against deepfakes. Their inclusion records constituency-building and agenda-setting power; it does not show that either has authority over model releases or deployment terms.
The list also puts standards and public institutions in the same frame. Doreen Bogdan-Martin, secretary-general of the U.N. International Telecommunication Union, appears among the Shapers, while Arvind Raman is identified as acting head of the U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation and director of NIST. Their relevance is institutional authority over participation, testing and rules rather than ownership of a model.
Publicis Sapient CEO Nigel Vaz was named to TIME’s 2026 TIME100 AI for work helping enterprises move from AI experimentation to execution. Source: Publicis Sapient announcement.
Publicis Sapient CEO Nigel Vaz is recognized for a “People + Products” strategy at a technology company that combines consulting staff with enterprise AI platforms. In the company’s announcement, Publicis Sapient says a pharmaceutical client cut content-creation time by 75% and costs by up to 45%, while an auto manufacturer cut operational costs by 40% and resolved more than 62% of issues the same day. These are company-reported case results, without an independent evaluation or disclosed baselines in the source.
Arvind Krishna, IBM’s chairman and CEO, joined IBM in 1990, led IBM Research and its Cloud and Cognitive Software business, became CEO in 2020 and chairman later that year. His track record explains why his argument is consequential: IBM is emphasizing smaller, specialized models for enterprise tasks where reliability, security and control can matter more than answering every possible question. That is a competitive thesis against companies pursuing ever-larger general-purpose models, not proof that smaller models will prevail.
Healthcare entries show the stakes of that deployment shift:
AGIBOT says founder and CEO Deng Taihua was named to TIME100 AI 2026 as the company develops embodied-AI robotics. Source: AGIBOT announcement.
Indian and Indian-origin honorees illustrate how the list’s geography and infrastructure extend beyond U.S. labs. Counts differ because TIME does not classify people by nationality: YourStory identifies 10, while a Times of India overview identifies nine. The difference is classification, not evidence of a change to TIME’s 100.
Vivek Raghavan, co-founder of Bengaluru-based Sarvam AI, spent more than a decade working on Aadhaar’s technology infrastructure before co-founding the Indian-language AI company in 2023. YourStory reports that Nvidia joined an extension completing Sarvam’s $300 million Series B at an approximately $1.5 billion valuation. That financing gives the sovereignty argument capital and scale, but the valuation is a reported deal figure, not a public market price.
Anima Anandkumar is a Caltech Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences who previously held senior AI research roles at Nvidia and Amazon Web Services and helped develop the FourCastNet weather model. A local profile says she co-founded physics-focused startup Accelerated Understanding the day before the list was published. It also relays the founders’ claim that a neural-operator model processed 5 trillion data points in one prompt; the report says the claim has not been independently benchmarked.
Deng Taihua, co-founder, chairman and CEO of AGIBOT, represents embodied AI. AGIBOT says it was founded in 2023, builds humanoid and quadruped systems, and that its 15,000th robot rolled off the production line in June. In its announcement, the company cites Counterpoint Research for a claim that it ranked first in global humanoid shipments in the first half of 2026 with more than 43% share. Production volume and shipment share are company-reported claims; they do not by themselves establish robots’ utilization, reliability or economics.
TIME says it is adding AI reporters in London, Washington and San Francisco, relaunching its In the Loop newsletter and planning its first TIME100 AI Leadership Forum in Washington in 2027. That expansion is an investment in coverage, while also making it important to separate editorial recognition from independently tested impact. YourStory notes that Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S is a TIME100 honoree and that Cognizant is a signature partner of the 2026 program; Deloitte is listed as premier sponsor and Booking.com as another signature partner. The sponsorship context does not invalidate the list, but it is relevant to how readers interpret institutional incentives.
AGIBOT’s official A2 Ultra product page shows the humanoid platform associated with the company’s embodied-AI robotics portfolio. Source: AGIBOT announcement.
The next test is whether visibility becomes durable control. For the model and infrastructure executives, that means audited deployment, capacity and safety results rather than category placement. For healthcare and insurance systems, it means independently measured outcomes, denominators, error rates and accountability when decisions fail. For labor, creator and policy advocates, it means documented contract, legal or regulatory changes and evidence of who bears the costs. Until those records exist, TIME100 AI is best read as a snapshot of competing interests around AI’s operating model—not a verdict on who is objectively most influential.
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Apple reportedly cut some engineers’ daily AI allowances from $300 to $200 in October and is weighing deeper restrictions. The limits tighten control over model use, but unused allowances make the savings uncertain.
Factory is acquiring coding-agent collaboration platform HumanLayer after raising $200 million in September. It plans to integrate shared tasks and planning tools, while HumanLayer promises open source, refunds and at least 30 days of continued service.
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Pangram is expanding its text-detection business into images and video. Browser checks and developer access broaden its reach, while company benchmark scores leave real-world error rates and costs unresolved.
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Riot Platforms says its 15-year Corsicana lease with Anthropic will generate about $28 billion in revenue. The tenant owns and operates the compute, while Riot develops power infrastructure and funds module reimbursements through debt or credits against future rent.
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Capital One Ventures leads Sentra’s $150 million Series C and gains a board seat as the company expands AI-agent data controls. Sentra reports roughly 100 major enterprise customers and revenue in the tens of millions, but exact revenue, valuation and comparative costs remain undisclosed.
Google agreed to support Anthropic’s lease obligations at TeraWulf’s Kentucky campus, strengthening its bid for project financing. The support starts after delivery milestones, while debt terms and a guaranteed construction price remain unsettled.
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