TIME Releases 2026 TIME100 AI List Featuring OpenAI, SpaceX, Amazon, Google Leaders and Chinese Figures

The 2026 TIME100 AI list, recognizing the 100 most influential people in global artificial intelligence, was released on August 27. It is divided into four sections: leaders, innovators, shapers, and thinkers. The list covers fields including large AI models, chip computing power, humanoid robots, data centers, AI agents, and AI safety. Many honorees come from leading companies with market capitalizations exceeding one hundred billion US dollars, such as SpaceX, Amazon, Micron Technology, and Google.

Over the past 12 months, executives including Elon Musk of xAI have driven leading AI companies toward public markets; Dario and Daniela Amodei of Anthropic have clashed with the Pentagon over the use of AI in weapons; founders such as Larry Ellison of Oracle have accelerated data center construction; and researchers like Yang Zhilin of Moonshot AI have developed large models.

The leaders section includes Mark Chen, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman of OpenAI; Elon Musk of SpaceX; Dario and Daniela Amodei of Anthropic; Arvind Krishna of IBM; Lila Ibrahim of DeepMind; Liang Rubo of ByteDance; Jeff Bezos of Prometheus; Josh Payne of Nscale; Hock Tan of Broadcom; Larry Ellison of Oracle; He Tingbo of Huawei; Wu Yongming of Alibaba; Michael Intrator of CoreWeave; and Liang Mengsong of SMIC.

The innovators section includes Li Ke of BYD, Michael Truell of Crusor, Yang Zhilin of Moonshot AI, Peter Steinberger of OpenClaw, Andrew Feldman of Cerebras, Deng Taihua of Agibot, Zhang Peng of Zhipu AI, and Sanjay Mehrotra of Micron Technology. The shapers section includes David Sacks of the Trump Science and Technology Advisory Committee, and Pat Grady and Alfred Lin of Sequoia Capital. The thinkers section includes Fei-Fei Li of World Labs and Mira Murati of Thinking Machines Lab.