On August 27, TIME magazine officially released the 2026 TIME100 AI list, its fourth annual ranking of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence. Seventeen representatives graced the magazine covers, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, xAI founder Elon Musk, Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming, and Stanford Professor Fei-Fei Li.
Cover Stars: Wu Yongming as the Sole Chinese Business Leader
Wu Yongming is the only Chinese entrepreneur to appear on this year’s cover, featured alongside Musk, Altman, Bezos, Amodei, and others. TIME wrote: "Since Jack Ma founded the company in 1999, Alibaba has continually reinvented its role… Now, under CEO Wu Yongming, the company is undergoing its most significant transformation yet—becoming a global leader in open-source AI.".
Wu has made AI Alibaba's strategic core, driving commercialization and the transition to the agentic era. He built a full-stack AI layout covering compute, chips, models, and applications. Alibaba Cloud remains the largest in Asia-Pacific, while the Qwen series models have surpassed 3 billion global downloads, with over 300,000 derivative models—making it the world's most popular open-source model family.
China's AI Power: Record Representation Across the Full Industry Chain
Beyond Wu, multiple Chinese AI figures made the list, setting a record for Chinese representation across chips, LLMs, embodied intelligence, smart vehicles, and research:
Leaders: ByteDance Chairman & CEO Liang Rubo, Huawei Board Member He Tingbo, SMIC Co-CEO Liang Mongsong.
Innovators: Moonshot AI Co-founder & CEO Yang Zhilin, AgiBot Chairman & CEO Deng Taihua, Zhipu CEO Zhang Peng, BYD Executive Vice President Stella Li, and Manus founder Xiao Hong.
Thinkers: Shanghai AI Laboratory Director and Chief Scientist Zhou Bowen.
Notably, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng, and Unitree founder Wang Xingxing were not included. TIME's editor-in-chief specifically named Yang Zhilin, noting that Moonshot AI's models received "extraordinary attention" over the past year, sometimes even surpassing America's most advanced competitors.
Record Chinese representation—spanning the entire chain from upstream chips (He, Liang) to LLMs (Yang, Zhang), embodied intelligence (Deng), and application platforms (Liang, Wu)—signals a shift in global perception. Wu's cover appearance suggests international recognition of China's transition from "AI application market" to "AI open-source innovation hub." The absence of figures like Huang and Liang also reminds us that such lists reflect specific editorial narratives about AI's "story of the year," rather than a comprehensive judgment of industrial standing.