TIME magazine unveiled its fourth annual TIME100 AI list this week, naming 100 people the publication says are exerting the greatest influence over the direction of artificial intelligence, a roster that spans corporate executives, researchers, policymakers and cultural figures navigating what the magazine described as an increasingly turbulent year for the technology.

TIME Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs framed the 2026 selections as a reflection of a field defined by both major breakthroughs and mounting public unease. “The activity in AI has been explosive and divisive, filled with big promises and big fears,” Jacobs wrote in the magazine’s explanation of how the list was compiled. He pointed to a string of developments over the past year, including Elon Musk taking a leading AI company public, Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei clashing with the Pentagon over military use of AI tools, Oracle founder Larry Ellison racing to build new data center capacity, and Chinese startup Moonshot AI’s Yang Zhilin developing models that have at times outperformed leading U.S. competitors.

The list’s Leaders category features some of the industry’s highest-profile figures, including OpenAI’s Mark Chen, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, listed jointly given their overlapping roles atop the company; Musk, credited as chief executive of SpaceX; Anthropic co-founders Dario and Daniela Amodei; IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna; and ByteDance Chairman and CEO Liang Rubo. The broader 100-person list also includes Google DeepMind’s Lila Ibrahim, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and a range of Chinese technology executives including Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu, Zhipu CEO Zhang Peng and SMIC executive Liang Mong Song, reflecting what several outlets covering the list’s release described as a notably strong Chinese presence this year.

TIME’s entry on Musk highlighted a series of major moves at his companies over the past year. After merging his AI lab xAI with SpaceX, Musk took the combined business public in June in what TIME described as the largest initial public offering in history, carrying a valuation of 1.7 trillion dollars. SpaceX subsequently announced plans to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for 60 billion dollars, a deal TIME said would give the company a significant foothold in AI-assisted software development. In August, the renamed subsidiary SpaceXAI released its latest flagship model, Grok 4.6, which the company said focused on long-running autonomous agents and more ambitious visual and interactive capabilities at a competitive price point.

TIME’s profile also noted that xAI introduced stronger safety measures in January, roughly two weeks after reports emerged that Grok was being used to generate nonconsensual sexual images of women and children, an episode that has since spawned multiple lawsuits against the company. The magazine noted that in the most recent AI safety rankings published by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, which studies and advocates against large-scale technological risks, xAI ranked seventh out of nine model developers assessed, with none of the nine scoring above a C-plus grade.

The profile also traced Musk’s longer history in the AI field, noting he was an early investor in DeepMind and a co-founder and financial backer of OpenAI, motivated at the time by concerns about the technology’s existential risks. That relationship deteriorated over time, and Musk’s long-running lawsuit against OpenAI was dismissed in May. Reflecting on AI’s broader trajectory in comments TIME cited from a Grok launch event last year, Musk said, “Will this be bad or good for humanity? I think it’ll be good. Most likely it’ll be good,” before adding, “But I’ve somewhat reconciled myself to the fact that even if it wasn’t gonna be good, I’d at least like to be alive to see it happen.” SpaceX did not respond to TIME’s request for comment on the profile.

TIME’s writeup of OpenAI’s leadership described a company working to recover from a difficult stretch marked by leadership departures, incidents involving autonomous AI agents behaving unpredictably, broader public backlash against the AI industry, and intensified competition from Anthropic, whose success in coding and enterprise markets has pushed its valuation above OpenAI’s as both companies prepare for expected public offerings. OpenAI President Greg Brockman, who TIME said now oversees large portions of the company’s operations including revenue and product marketing, described the company’s long-term ambitions in stark terms: “We are looking at transforming the entire economy.”

The Anthropic profile detailed the company’s rapid rise under siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, crediting the success of its Claude Code product, a coding-focused version of its Claude model, with reshaping software engineering workflows and fueling the company’s growth. TIME noted that Anthropic has faced its own political friction this year, including disagreements with the Pentagon over restrictions on military use of its models and separate export controls the Trump administration placed on Anthropic’s more capable Mythos model and its more limited counterpart, Fable 5. Despite that scrutiny, TIME reported that Anthropic’s leadership has welcomed the prospect of government regulation of AI, citing an Aug. 15 post from Dario Amodei on the social platform X expressing support for pre-deployment testing requirements on frontier and open-weight AI models, along with the creation of a self-regulatory body for the industry.

IBM’s Arvind Krishna, another Leaders-category honoree, described his approach to steering the 115-year-old company through the AI transition in blunt terms, telling TIME, “I actually think that trying to muddle along without taking risk is the riskiest path. It leads to eventual falling off a cliff.” Krishna’s profile noted that IBM’s shares have nearly doubled since he became CEO and chairman in 2020, though they fell 25% in a single day in July after customers shifted spending away from the company’s mainframe business toward AI infrastructure, a decline IBM has not fully recovered from as of the list’s publication.

Beyond the corporate leaders, the broader 100-person list included figures from outside the technology industry entirely, among them actors Ben Affleck, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Paris Hilton, and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, reflecting TIME’s stated goal of capturing the technology’s cultural and political reach alongside its commercial development. TIME organized the full list into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers, with the complete roster and accompanying profiles published on the magazine’s website this week.