TIME magazine unveiled its 2026 TIME100 AI list on Aug. 27, the ranking’s fourth edition, naming Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming among a high-water mark of Chinese AI figures while omitting Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang after three consecutive appearances since 2023. More than 70 honorees came from the United States, and nine Chinese leaders were selected across large language models, chips, smart vehicles and research, including Huawei’s He Tingbo, SMIC’s Liang Mong Song, Moonshot AI’s Yang Zhilin, Zhipu AI’s Zhang Peng and others. Corporate and industry names included OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Mark Chen, Elon Musk, Anthropic co-founders Dario and Daniela Amodei, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, ByteDance’s Liang Rubo, Broadcom’s Hock Tan and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, while AMD CEO Lisa Su, TSMC Chairman C.C. Wei, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis were absent. Unexpected selections included Paris Hilton for efforts against deepfakes, actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ben Affleck, Sen. Bernie Sanders and AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. TIME Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs framed the list around public-market moves such as xAI’s IPO, a race to build massive data centers and rising Chinese model competition, alongside tensions over infrastructure, military use of AI and Sanders’ call to stop superintelligence development.