The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2026

Max Tegmark still believes the AI industry isn’t doing enough to protect us from the potential harms of its increasingly powerful models. The MIT professor is the founder of the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a nonprofit aimed at reducing the global catastrophic risks posed by AI. 

To the Swedish-American physicist, lagging regulation on the AI industry has built a “race to the bottom,” where firms overlook safety concerns in favor of fast shipments. But a rapid shift in public sentiment towards AI in recent years may change things. An American public increasingly wary about job security, data center construction, and AI use by minors could make AI safety a hot-button issue in the upcoming midterms—and lawmakers are responding with legislation. “I haven’t seen as much shift in U.S. policymaking in the past decade, as I have in the past three months. It’s been amazing,” Tegmark says. 

The organization also issues grades on safety and security to the world’s biggest AI companies, hoping to incentivize the relatively unregulated industry to establish some guardrails. And its scores have been unflinching: top scoring Anthropic earned a C+ on the nonprofit’s AI Safety Index released this summer.

Tegmark, who has met with lawmakers and advisers from both sides of the aisle, says, “From left to right, there’s this vast support for AI that cures cancer and complements and helps humans by providing useful tools we’re still in charge of.” At the same time, he says, “There’s this massive opposition to building AI that we don’t know how to control, that’s romancing our kids, that’s teaching terrorists to make bioweapons.”