On August 27, 2026, TIME released its fourth annual TIME100 AI list, naming 100 individuals the magazine judges to be the most influential in artificial intelligence this year. The selection was led by editor Ayesha Javed, who spent months working with TIME journalists and contributors to identify the group that best represents the year's key storylines.
The 2026 edition arrives as AI has moved from a curiosity to a constant presence in work and daily life, a shift the magazine's editors say is reflected in the list's composition. The honorees are organized into four categories — Leaders, Innovators, Shapers, and Thinkers — capturing executives, researchers, policymakers, and cultural figures who are driving the field's most consequential developments.
What's new
- Leaders include OpenAI's Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Mark Chen; Anthropic co-founders Dario and Daniela Amodei; xAI's Elon Musk; Oracle's Larry Ellison; IBM's Arvind Krishna; Broadcom's Hock Tan; ByteDance's Liang Rubo; Google DeepMind's Lila Ibrahim; Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Matt Garman; Nvidia's Jensen Huang is notably absent from the 2026 list.
- Innovators feature Moonshot AI's Yang Zhilin; Cursor's Michael Truell; Suno's Mikey Shulman; Cerebras Systems' Andrew Feldman; Manus's Xiao Hong; Zhipu's Zhang Peng; AgiBot's Deng Taihua; Ricursive Intelligence's Azalia Mirhoseini and Anna Goldie; OpenEvidence's Daniel Nadler; and actor-filmmaker Ben Affleck.
- Shapers encompass Senator Bernie Sanders, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt (co-founder, Creators Coalition on AI), UN ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin, and Sequoia Capital's Pat Grady and Alfred Lin.
- Thinkers include researchers such as Caltech's Anima Anandkumar, Cortical Labs' Hon Weng Chong, and Sarvam AI's Vivek Raghavan.
The cover date for the print edition is September 7, 2026. TIME also announced an expansion of its AI coverage team, adding reporters in London, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, and plans to relaunch its "In the Loop" AI newsletter as a five-day-a-week briefing this fall. A first-ever TIME100 AI Leadership Forum is scheduled for Washington, D.C. in 2027, building on AI events held in Davos, Cannes, New York City, and San Francisco this year.
Why it matters
The 2026 list signals a broadening of influence beyond pure research labs into infrastructure, policy, and culture. The inclusion of figures like Sanders and Gordon-Levitt alongside data-center builders such as Ellison and Broadcom's Tan highlights how the conversation has shifted toward compute capacity, regulatory pressure, and creative-rights frameworks. The absence of Nvidia's Jensen Huang — a fixture in previous AI power rankings — underscores how editorial emphasis has moved from chip supply alone to a wider set of levers including deployment, governance, and public discourse.
Our take
TIME's fourth edition reads less like a leaderboard and more like a map of where power is concentrating: model makers, compute landlords, and the political coalition forming around them. The list's structure makes that legible in a way a flat ranking would not.
