Organizations shaping AI
Explore how companies, labs, and institutions have shaped AI.
Organizations
207 organizations shownOpenAI
The maker of ChatGPT, Codex and the GPT models, announced in 2015 as a nonprofit lab with nothing to sell and now a public benefit corporation. Its bet that bigger language models keep getting more useful set the pace for the field.
View organization →companyAnthropic
A public benefit corporation started in 2021 by seven people who left OpenAI. It builds the Claude models and sells them through a chat app, an API and agent tools such as Claude Code.
View organization →companyAlphabet's search and advertising business, which also runs YouTube, Google Cloud and Pixel hardware. Its researchers wrote the 2017 transformer paper modern models are built on, and it now puts Gemini into Search and its own app.
View organization →companyNVIDIA
The chipmaker whose GPUs train and run most frontier AI models, a business that grew out of 3D graphics cards for gaming. It now also finances the AI buildout, helping customers pay for data centers full of its own chips.
View organization →companyMeta
The company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which pays for its AI ambitions with advertising. Its Llama models drove much of the open-weight boom, and Meta Superintelligence Labs now builds its frontier models.
View organization →labGoogle DeepMind
Google's AI lab, formed in 2023 by merging DeepMind with the Brain team from Google Research. It builds the Gemini models and carries Google's frontier research, reporting up through the product side.
View organization →companyMicrosoft
The company behind Windows, Microsoft 365 and the Azure cloud, large enough to fund a frontier lab from operating cash. It matters to AI mostly as OpenAI's long-time backer and cloud host, and it sells Copilot across its own software.
View organization →companyxAI
Elon Musk's AI lab, built around the Grok models and pitched from the start as a rival to OpenAI. It is now part of SpaceX, which absorbed it in February 2026 and put Grok in the same company as Starlink and the rockets.
View organization →companyDeepSeek
A Hangzhou lab building open-weight language models, owned and funded by Liang Wenfeng's High-Flyer hedge fund. Its V3 and R1 models came close to Western frontier performance at a fraction of the reported cost.
View organization →companyAmazon
The online retailer that became a cloud and logistics giant through AWS. It sells models through Bedrock, designs its own Trainium chips and holds a multibillion-dollar stake in Anthropic.
View organization →companyAlibaba
A Chinese conglomerate that began as an online marketplace in 1999 and now runs Alibaba Cloud. It builds the Qwen family of open-weight models, its answer to the AI push at every other cloud provider.
View organization →companyApple
The maker of the iPhone, the Mac and the software that runs them, including the on-device models behind Apple Intelligence. It put ChatGPT into iOS in 2024, then licensed Google's Gemini for a rebuilt Siri in 2026.
View organization →companyMistral AI
A Paris lab founded in 2023 by alumni of Google DeepMind and Meta, building frontier language models. It made its name with open-weight releases like Mistral 7B and sells API access and enterprise deals to companies and governments.
View organization →companyAnysphere
The company behind Cursor, an AI-assisted code editor forked from VS Code. SpaceX bought it in a deal that closed in August 2026, putting a code editor in the same company as Starlink and the rockets.
View organization →companySpaceX
The reusable rocket company that also runs the Starlink satellite network. It absorbed xAI in February 2026 and bought Cursor a few months later, which turned a launch company into an AI company as well.
View organization →governmentWhite House
The Executive Office of the President, including the Office of Science and Technology Policy. It sets federal AI policy by executive order, starting with the January 2025 order that revoked the previous AI safety framework.
View organization →governmentUnited States Department of Commerce
The US cabinet department whose Bureau of Industry and Security runs export controls. It decides which AI chips and models may leave the country, and in 2026 it suspended, then cleared, two Anthropic frontier models.
View organization →companyZhipu AI
A Chinese AI lab founded in 2019 and branded internationally as Z.ai. It builds the GLM family of open-weight models, which took the open-weights lead in 2026 with GLM-5.2 and GLM-5.3.
View organization →companyMoonshot AI
A Beijing lab behind Kimi, an assistant built around long-context models that hold onto very long conversations, documents and coding sessions. It publishes its weights openly, including Kimi K2 and Kimi K3.
View organization →companyIBM
The century-old computing company, now mostly hybrid cloud and consulting, where machine learning got its name in 1959. It sells its own Granite models through watsonx, and its consultants resell OpenAI's models to enterprises.
View organization →companyPerplexity
An AI search engine that answers in prose with citations instead of a page of links, and sells the same stack as an API. It has since pushed into assistants that act on your behalf, starting with its Comet browser.
View organization →governmentUnited States Department of War
The US military's civilian department, legally still the Department of Defense, renamed for public use in 2025. As a buyer of AI it has leverage no commercial customer has, which it used against Anthropic in 2026.
View organization →companyCognition
The company behind Devin, an AI agent pitched as an autonomous software engineer. Devin takes a task, plans it, writes and tests code across a real repository and reports back, rather than completing one line at a time.
View organization →labDeepMind
The London lab that spent its first decade pointing one learning approach at games, then at protein structure. Google bought it in 2014 and merged it with Google Brain to form Google DeepMind in 2023.
View organization →companyGitHub
The Git hosting and collaboration service most of the software industry works through, owned by Microsoft since 2018. It shipped Copilot with OpenAI in 2021, putting AI code completion directly into the editor.
View organization →companyBroadcom
A semiconductor and infrastructure software maker, from networking chips to the software that runs data centers. It co-designs custom AI chips for others, including Google's TPUs and Jalapeño, OpenAI's first.
View organization →companyHugging Face
The company that runs the Hub, the shared home for open model weights, datasets and demo apps, and maintains the Transformers library. Labs ship their models through it, and NVIDIA agreed to buy it in September 2026.
View organization →communityOpenClaw
Peter Steinberger's open-source personal agent, which runs on your own machine and takes instructions over WhatsApp or Telegram. Launched as Clawdbot in November 2025 and renamed twice, it is now run by a nonprofit foundation.
View organization →companySoftBank
Masayoshi Son's Tokyo investment holding company, which began in 1981 as a software distributor and still controls the chip designer Arm. It is now one of the largest backers of AI infrastructure, from Stargate to data center campuses.
View organization →companyAMD
A chipmaker selling CPUs, GPUs and the Instinct accelerators it pitches for AI data centers. In August 2026 it bought Taalas, a startup that etches model weights straight into the silicon.
View organization →companyCerebras
A chipmaker that builds AI processors out of a single silicon wafer the size of a dinner plate. It sells them for training and inference as an alternative to clustering thousands of GPUs.
View organization →companyCharacter.AI
A chat platform, run by Character Technologies, where users create and talk to custom AI characters. After lawsuits over teen self-harm, it barred open-ended chat for users under 18 starting in October 2025.
View organization →companyTesla
Elon Musk's publicly traded electric vehicle and energy company. Its board committed $2 billion to Musk's separate AI venture xAI in January 2026, after shareholders voted against the move.
View organization →labThinking Machines Lab
Mira Murati's San Francisco AI lab, staffed by a cluster of former OpenAI researchers. It builds frontier models and the Tinker training API, on the back of a record $2 billion seed round.
View organization →labCohere
A Toronto model developer co-founded by Aidan Gomez, a coauthor of the transformer paper. It sells its Command models, Embed and Rerank to banks and other regulated industries wary of consumer-facing AI vendors.
View organization →companyOracle
The database company Larry Ellison co-founded in 1977, now also a landlord for GPUs. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure rents compute to AI labs and enterprises, and Oracle is a founding partner in the Stargate data center venture.
View organization →companyRunway
A New York applied research company founded in 2018 that started out building AI tools for filmmakers. Its Gen video models and diffusion research helped define AI video generation as a category.
View organization →companySuno
A Cambridge, Massachusetts music company whose product writes and performs a song from a text prompt. Its $125 million round in 2024 was the largest in music AI, and the major labels sued it, then Warner settled for a licensing deal.
View organization →companyWaymo
Alphabet's self-driving car company, spun out of Google's 2009 project. It runs driverless ride-hailing in several US cities, and builds simulators and a world model so its cars can practice driving where nobody gets hurt.
View organization →companyWindsurf
An agentic coding IDE, formerly called Codeium, now owned by Cognition. OpenAI's $3 billion deal to buy it collapsed in 2025, Google licensed its technology and hired its CEO, and Cognition bought what was left days later.
View organization →companyByteDance
The owner of TikTok, Douyin and CapCut, grown from a four-bedroom apartment in 2012 to around 150,000 people. It builds the Seedance video models, whose output got Hollywood writing letters.
View organization →companyCloudflare
The network company that sits in front of roughly a fifth of all websites, handling their security and performance. It runs inference on GPUs inside that network and sees both AI crawler traffic and the attacks AI now helps launch.
View organization →companyIntel
The company that has made x86 processors since 1968 and largely missed the GPU shift that AI runs on. It answers with Gaudi accelerators and a contract foundry, and took $5 billion from NVIDIA in 2025 to build chips together.
View organization →companyManus
A Chinese-founded AI agent company that carries out tasks across a browser and other tools, built on licensed models like Claude rather than its own. Meta's deal to buy it collapsed in 2026 after Chinese regulators blocked it.
View organization →nonprofitMETR
A research nonprofit that tests frontier models for autonomous capabilities that could pose catastrophic risk. It also ran a 2025 randomized trial that found AI coding tools slowed experienced developers down.
View organization →companyPalantir
A data integration and analytics vendor to governments and large companies, which since 2023 has put language models to work through its AI Platform. It runs the Maven Smart System, the Pentagon's AI targeting and intelligence platform.
View organization →universityPrinceton University
The New Jersey research university where Fei-Fei Li began building ImageNet in 2006. Its Princeton Language and Intelligence initiative, launched in 2023, studies large language models across more than a dozen departments.
View organization →companySamsung Electronics
South Korea's largest electronics maker, founded in 1969 as a Samsung Group subsidiary. Its memory chips and contract foundry business sit deep in the AI hardware supply chain that every large model depends on.
View organization →governmentUK AI Security Institute
A research body inside the UK science department that tests frontier models for security risk. It opened in 2023 as the AI Safety Institute and took its current name in 2025, when bias and speech left its remit.
View organization →universityUniversity of Toronto
A Canadian research university and Geoffrey Hinton's academic home since the 1980s. His lab there did foundational neural network work, from making deep networks trainable again to the 2012 AlexNet result.
View organization →companyWiz
A cloud security company that scans infrastructure for risk without installing agents, now part of Google. Google's $32 billion purchase, closed in March 2026, was one of the largest cybersecurity acquisitions on record.
View organization →companyAleph Alpha
A German developer of language models for governments and regulated industries, founded in 2019. It agreed in 2026 to combine with Cohere, pitched as the first transatlantic sovereign AI provider.
View organization →companyAT&T
The US telecom company selling wireless, broadband and business connectivity. Its Bell Labs and AT&T Labs-Research staff produced support vector machines and the LeNet-5 convolutional network in the 1990s.
View organization →companyBlackstone
An alternative asset manager running private equity, real estate and credit funds, begun as a small M&A advisory boutique. It is a partner in NVIDIA's 2026 plan to finance AI data centers against the GPUs inside them.
View organization →companyBlock
The company behind Square, Cash App, Afterpay, TIDAL and Bitkey, run by Jack Dorsey. In February 2026 it cut 40 percent of its staff in a single day and named AI as the reason.
View organization →universityCarnegie Mellon University
A Pittsburgh research university built from Andrew Carnegie's technical school and the Mellon Institute. Geoffrey Hinton was on its faculty when he, Rumelhart and Williams published backpropagation in Nature in 1986.
View organization →companyCoreWeave
A cloud provider built for AI workloads, renting NVIDIA GPU capacity to labs and enterprises. NVIDIA is both its supplier and an investor, a circularity that drew scrutiny as CoreWeave grew into a public company.
View organization →governmentEuropean Commission
The EU's executive arm, the only body that can propose EU legislation and the one that enforces it across member states. Its AI Office is the lead enforcer of the AI Act's rules for general-purpose AI models.
View organization →governmentEuropean Union
The political and economic union of European member states created by the Maastricht Treaty. Its AI Act is the bloc's binding law on AI risk and safety, applied the same way in every member state.
View organization →companyFigure
A robotics company building humanoid robots for warehouse and logistics work, run by its own Helix model for perception and control. Its September 2025 Series C valued it at $39 billion.
View organization →companyG42
An Abu Dhabi AI holding company chaired by Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the UAE's ruling family. It builds cloud and AI infrastructure in more than 30 countries, with Microsoft and Mubadala among its backers.
View organization →companyGoldman Sachs
A Wall Street investment bank founded in 1869. In August 2026 NVIDIA named it among six partners arranging outside capital for AI compute, the one bank in a group otherwise made of asset managers.
View organization →labInflection AI
The company Reid Hoffman, Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan founded in 2022 to build Pi, a conversational companion. Microsoft hired away its founders and most of its staff in 2024, an unusual reverse acquihire.
View organization →labMicrosoft Research
Microsoft's research division, founded in 1991, with labs from Redmond to Cambridge, Montreal and Nairobi. It publishes papers and open-source work with no shipping date attached, including ResNet, which made very deep networks trainable.
View organization →mediaNews Corp
Rupert Murdoch's publishing company, owner of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and the Times of London. It licenses its journalism to AI companies instead of suing them, starting with a multi-year OpenAI deal in 2024.
View organization →companyOpenRouter
A single API in front of hundreds of models from dozens of providers, so switching models means changing a parameter, not rewriting code. One of the first LLM marketplaces, it agreed in August 2026 to be bought by Stripe.
View organization →companyPoolside
A coding-first AI lab founded in 2023 by Jason Warner, GitHub's CTO through the Copilot launch, and Eiso Kant. It trains the open-weight Laguna models on the premise that code teaches reasoning better than text, and sells to big companies.
View organization →companyQualcomm
The San Diego chipmaker behind Snapdragon, the processors and modems inside most premium Android phones, plus wireless patent licensing. It builds neural processing units into those chips to run AI on the device instead of in the cloud.
View organization →companyReplit
Amjad Masad's browser-based coding environment, which grew into a place where people who can't write code describe an app and get one. Its Agent product, which builds the app for you, is now the business.
View organization →companySafe Superintelligence
Ilya Sutskever's research lab in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, co-founded with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy. It has one declared product, a safe superintelligence, and no plan to ship anything else on the way there.
View organization →companySalesforce
The company that built the CRM category on software rented through a browser instead of installed on a server. It put Claude inside Agentforce and Slack in 2026, betting its own CRM data on somebody else's model.
View organization →companyScale AI
A data company selling the unglamorous layer underneath model training. It supplies labeled data, evaluations and human-review pipelines to AI labs, enterprises and the US government, with Meta holding a non-voting 49 percent stake.
View organization →companySK hynix
A South Korean memory chip maker, second in the world only to Samsung. It supplies the high-bandwidth memory that frontier models train and run on, which makes it one of the most closely watched suppliers in the AI buildout.
View organization →companyStability AI
A model company that builds open-weight generative models for images, video, audio and 3D. Its 2022 Stable Diffusion release put image generation on consumer hardware and started an argument about open weights that is still going.
View organization →universityStanford University
A California research university, home to the AI lab John McCarthy founded there in 1963. Its computer science department produced FlashAttention and Direct Preference Optimization, both now standard machinery in model training.
View organization →governmentState of California
The state government of the place most AI labs call home. It passed SB 53 in 2025, which made California the first state to require frontier model developers to publish a safety framework.
View organization →governmentState of Colorado
A US state government that legislated on AI before Congress did. Its SB24-205, signed in 2024, was the first comprehensive state AI law, aimed at algorithmic discrimination by high-risk systems.
View organization →companyThe Walt Disney Company
The entertainment company whose characters are among the most heavily defended intellectual property in the world. That is what made its 2025 deal licensing them into OpenAI's Sora worth noticing.
View organization →universityUniversité de Montréal
A French-language research university in Montreal, where Yoshua Bengio has taught since 1993. His lab there grew into Mila, the Quebec AI institute and one of the field's main deep learning research centers.
View organization →companyXiaomi
A Chinese phone and consumer electronics maker, founded in 2010 and listed in Hong Kong since 2018. Its MiMo team releases open-weight language and omnimodal models, including a trillion-parameter model under MIT in 2026.
View organization →companyAdobe
The software company behind Photoshop, Acrobat and the PDF. It builds the Firefly family of generative models and wires them straight into the creative apps its customers already work in.
View organization →companyAlden Global Capital
A New York hedge fund that owns MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, and through them dozens of US dailies. Eight of those newspapers sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement in April 2024.
View organization →nonprofitAllen Institute for AI
Ai2, the Seattle nonprofit research institute founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It builds the OLMo language models and publishes their weights, training data and code together, not just an API.
View organization →companyAmpere Computing
A Santa Clara chip designer building energy-efficient Arm server processors for cloud computing and AI inference. SoftBank agreed to buy it for $6.5 billion in March 2025.
View organization →companyApollo
An alternative asset manager spanning private equity, credit and real estate. It is one of six financiers in NVIDIA's August 2026 platforms meant to raise over $500 billion for AI data centers.
View organization →nonprofitARC Prize
The nonprofit behind ARC-AGI, a family of benchmarks where tasks people find easy stay hard for models. It grew from François Chollet's 2019 paper and a public competition into a foundation in 2025.
View organization →companyArduino
An open-source hardware and software platform built around low-cost microcontroller boards for makers, educators and prototypers. It joined Qualcomm as an independent subsidiary in October 2025.
View organization →companyASML
The maker of the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines that print the most advanced chips, with no real rival at that end. It took about 11 percent of Mistral AI in September 2025, a toolmaker buying into a model lab.
View organization →companyAstral
Charlie Marsh's company for Python tooling written in Rust: Ruff, uv and the ty type checker. OpenAI agreed to buy it in March 2026 and folded the team into Codex, putting much of Python's tooling under one lab.
View organization →companyBaidu
A Chinese search engine operator that has turned much of its business toward AI. It builds the Ernie family of models, competing with DeepSeek and other Chinese labs for users in China's domestic market.
View organization →governmentBeijing Municipal Government
The city government of China's capital. It staged the first World Humanoid Robot Games in August 2025, putting hundreds of robots through public competition at the Olympic speed skating oval.
View organization →companyBlackRock
The asset manager behind the iShares ETFs and the Aladdin risk platform. It signed onto NVIDIA's August 2026 compute financing platforms, which aim to draw over $500 billion of outside capital into AI.
View organization →companyBrookfield
A Toronto-based owner and operator of infrastructure, real estate, credit and renewable power, with roots in an 1899 Brazilian utility. It puts infrastructure money behind GPUs as a partner in NVIDIA's August 2026 AI financing platforms.
View organization →companyBun
A JavaScript runtime, package manager, test runner and bundler in one binary, built on JavaScriptCore and MIT licensed. Anthropic bought it in December 2025, and Claude Code runs on it.
View organization →governmentCenter for AI Standards and Innovation
A NIST body that tests AI models for security and national-security risks. It began in 2023 as the US AI Safety Institute and was renamed CAISI in June 2025 under a more industry-focused mandate.
View organization →companyClickHouse
The company behind ClickHouse, the open-source column-store database Alexey Milovidov started in 2009 for real-time analytics. It moved into LLM observability by buying Langfuse.
View organization →governmentCommonwealth of Virginia
The state government of Virginia. Its Executive Order 22 of September 2026 withdrew state fast-tracking from large data centers, barred state nondisclosure agreements about them and created an AI task force.
View organization →labCompVis
Björn Ommer's computer vision research group, first at Heidelberg University and now at LMU Munich. It built the first Stable Diffusion model with Runway and Stability AI in 2022.
View organization →companyConfluent
The company behind Apache Kafka, commercializing the real-time data streaming platform its founders built at LinkedIn. IBM bought it for $11 billion in March 2026 to feed live data to enterprise AI and agents.
View organization →nonprofitCornell Aeronautical Laboratory
A nonprofit aeronautics research lab in Buffalo, spun off from Cornell University in 1946 and sold and renamed Calspan in 1972. Frank Rosenblatt built and demonstrated the Perceptron there in 1958.
View organization →companyCrusoe
An AI infrastructure company that pairs its own power generation with gigawatt-scale data center campuses and a cloud platform, Crusoe Cloud. It rents that capacity to companies training and serving models.
View organization →universityDartmouth College
An Ivy League college in Hanover, New Hampshire, chartered in 1769. It hosted the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project, whose workshop proposal put the term artificial intelligence into use.
View organization →companyDatabricks
A data and AI platform from the original creators of Apache Spark, Delta Lake and MLflow. Its lakehouse lets companies run analytics and machine learning, and now AI models, on one copy of their data.
View organization →companyDeloitte
The accounting and consulting network William Welch Deloitte started in 1845, now legally separate member firms in 150 countries. It refunded part of a government fee after a report it sold cited work that did not exist.
View organization →companyDoorDash
A local delivery marketplace connecting consumers, merchants and independent drivers, founded in 2013 as Palo Alto Delivery. In October 2025 it began piloting deliveries in Waymo's driverless cars in Phoenix.
View organization →companyDuolingo
A language-learning app built by Carnegie Mellon researchers Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, used by tens of millions of people. In April 2025 its CEO said it would rely on AI over human contractors for course content.
View organization →companyElevenLabs
A generative audio company founded in 2022. Its speech models power text-to-speech, voice cloning and dubbing tools, as well as ElevenAgents, a platform for building conversational voice agents.
View organization →companyEureka Labs
Andrej Karpathy's AI-native school, pairing course material with an AI teaching assistant. Its first course, LLM101n, produced nanochat, a minimal codebase for training a ChatGPT-style model for about $100.
View organization →nonprofitEuropean Broadcasting Union
The alliance of public service broadcasters that runs Eurovision and Euroradio, with 115 members across 57 countries. It coordinated the BBC-led study that measured how often AI assistants get the news wrong.
View organization →governmentFederal Trade Commission
The US government's antitrust and consumer protection agency. In September 2025 it used its Section 6(b) authority to demand that seven companies explain how their AI chatbots treat children and teens.
View organization →companyFireworks AI
A model training and inference provider serving open models and customer-trained variants on serverless and dedicated deployments. In September 2026 it released Ember-1, its own post-trained model, as a research preview.
View organization →companyFlock Safety
An Atlanta company selling AI-powered license plate readers and camera networks to police departments and neighborhoods. Dozens of its cameras were found livestreaming to the open internet.
View organization →companyFluidstack
A GPU cloud and data center builder for AI labs, redesigning compute and power infrastructure to bring capacity online fast. It is building custom data centers in Texas and New York under Anthropic's $50 billion 2025 plan.
View organization →governmentFrance
The French Republic's national government. President Emmanuel Macron pledged 109 billion euros of AI investment at the 2025 Paris AI Action Summit, casting France as Europe's counterweight to US and Chinese spending.
View organization →labFuture of Humanity Institute
Nick Bostrom's former research institute in Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy. It spent 19 years on existential risk and the ethics of machine intelligence until the faculty let its contracts lapse, closing it in April 2024.
View organization →governmentGarante per la protezione dei dati personali
Italy's independent data protection authority, commonly called the Garante. In January 2025 it ordered an emergency block on DeepSeek's chatbot after judging the company's answers about its data practices inadequate.
View organization →companyggml.ai
Georgi Gerganov's company behind ggml, the tensor library that runs large models on hardware people already own. llama.cpp and whisper.cpp are built on it, and Hugging Face bought the company in 2026.
View organization →companyGPTZero
An AI writing detector founded in January 2023 and aimed first at teachers, now used in more than 3,500 colleges. It also audits published research, which is how fabricated citations in NeurIPS papers came to light.
View organization →companyGroq
An inference company running models on its own LPU chips and selling access through GroqCloud. Founder Jonathan Ross and much of the team left for NVIDIA in December 2025 under a licensing deal for the technology.
View organization →labHarmonic
Tudor Achim and Vlad Tenev's lab, started in 2024 to build mathematical superintelligence. Its Aristotle reasoning engine returns proofs checked in Lean rather than prose you have to take on trust.
View organization →companyHarvey
A San Francisco legal AI company started in 2022 by a lawyer and an AI researcher. It sells contract analysis, due diligence and litigation tools to law firms and in-house legal teams, and was an early OpenAI Startup Fund bet.
View organization →companyHellman & Friedman
A private-equity firm founded by Warren Hellman and Tully Friedman, working out of San Francisco, New York and London. It is a founding partner in the enterprise AI services company Anthropic set up in May 2026.
View organization →governmentHoly See
The Catholic Church's sovereign government, seated at the Vatican, with no power over how anyone builds AI. It shapes the debate through moral appeals instead, starting with the 2020 Rome Call for AI Ethics that Microsoft and IBM signed.
View organization →companyHuawei
A Shenzhen maker of telecom network gear, smartphones and laptops, with its own chip design arm, HiSilicon. It sits at the center of the US fight with China over 5G and AI chips, blacklisted since 2019 and still shipping its own silicon.
View organization →companyHumain
A Saudi AI company set up by the Public Investment Fund in 2025 and chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. It builds data centers, cloud infrastructure and models meant to make the kingdom a player in the industry.
View organization →labIDSIA
The Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Lugano, run jointly by USI and SUPSI. Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber developed LSTM there in 1997, giving neural networks a working memory for sequences.
View organization →labInception Labs
A Palo Alto lab started by Stanford's Stefano Ermon and collaborators. It builds diffusion language models, beginning with Mercury in 2025, that generate text in parallel rather than one token at a time.
View organization →companyio
Jony Ive and Sam Altman's AI hardware startup, set up to make devices that move past the screen. OpenAI bought it for $6.5 billion in May 2025 and folded the team in, while Ive's studio LoveFrom stayed independent.
View organization →labIrregular
A frontier AI security lab that builds platforms for simulating and monitoring how AI systems behave in real-world security scenarios. Anthropic used it as a third-party cybersecurity evaluator during its July 2026 incidents.
View organization →companyKKR
A generalist investment firm, among the pioneers of the leveraged buyout, now managing close to $800 billion. In AI it finances the layer under the models: data centers, power plants and debt secured on the GPUs themselves.
View organization →companyKoi Security
An endpoint security company, now part of Palo Alto Networks, that vets anything with an install button, from browser extensions to MCP servers and AI agents. It caught eight privacy extensions harvesting users' chatbot conversations.
View organization →companyLangfuse
An open-source platform for tracing, evaluating and debugging LLM applications in production, owned by ClickHouse since January 2026. It records the prompts, tool calls and outputs behind each answer, so teams can see what went wrong.
View organization →nonprofitLawZero
Yoshua Bengio's nonprofit AI safety lab, founded in 2025. It is building Scientist AI, a non-agentic system meant to explain the world rather than act in it, and keeps that work clear of commercial pressure.
View organization →nonprofitLinux Foundation
A nonprofit that hosts open-source projects, from the Linux kernel to newer agent standards, and governs them once they outgrow any one company. Its Agentic AI Foundation took in MCP, goose and AGENTS.md.
View organization →companyMarvell
A fabless chip designer for data infrastructure, selling networking and storage silicon and designing custom AI chips for cloud providers. In August 2026 it gave Google a warrant worth up to $12.2 billion tied to future chip orders.
View organization →companyMerck
The New Jersey drugmaker behind Keytruda, known as MSD outside the US and Canada. With Moderna it develops intismeran autogene, a personalized mRNA cancer therapy that succeeded in a phase 3 melanoma trial in August 2026.
View organization →companyMercor
A labor marketplace that pays expert professionals to write the training and evaluation data frontier labs use to teach their models. Turning expertise into training data was worth a $10 billion valuation by October 2025.
View organization →companyMGX
An Abu Dhabi investment company that puts its capital into AI and advanced technology. It was one of the four initial equity funders of Stargate, the $500 billion venture to build AI data centers in the United States.
View organization →companyMidjourney
An independent research lab whose text-to-image generator popularized AI art from inside a Discord server. Disney and Universal sued it in 2025, the first major Hollywood copyright case against an image generator.
View organization →universityMIT
The Massachusetts research university where John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky started an AI group in 1959. Its labs, CSAIL most visibly, still turn out AI research, and AI researchers who leave to found companies.
View organization →companyModerna
The Cambridge, Massachusetts company built on a single mRNA platform, best known for its COVID-19 vaccine. With Merck it develops intismeran autogene, a cancer therapy made individually from each patient's tumor mutations.
View organization →companyMoltbook
A Reddit-like social network where only AI agents may post, opened by Matt Schlicht in January 2026. Humans may watch, and within days the agents had invented religions, traded prompt injections and written a Magna Carta.
View organization →companyMongoDB
The company behind MongoDB, the document database that stores data as JSON-like records. It bought Voyage AI in February 2025 to build embeddings and reranking into the database for AI retrieval applications.
View organization →nonprofitMotion Picture Association
The film and streaming studios' trade association since 1922 and the keeper of American film ratings. It defends its members' copyrights, and in February 2026 it sent ByteDance a formal letter over Seedance 2.0's clips of studio characters.
View organization →governmentNational Development and Reform Commission
China's top economic planning agency under the State Council, which drafts the five-year plans and reviews foreign investment for national security. It used that review to block Meta's 2026 purchase of the AI agent maker Manus.
View organization →companyNaver
The South Korean internet company that runs the country's dominant search engine, plus commerce, cloud and fintech businesses. It builds HyperCLOVA X, a Korean-language model family it pitches as the cornerstone of Korea's sovereign AI.
View organization →companyNetflix
The streaming service that began in 1997 mailing DVDs, and one of the oldest users of machine learning in consumer software. Recommendation models decide much of what subscribers see, and generative AI now renders some of its effects.
View organization →companyNexperia
A Netherlands-based maker of basic semiconductors for cars and consumer electronics, majority owned by China's Wingtech. In October 2025 the Dutch government took emergency powers over it and a court suspended its China-appointed chief.
View organization →companyNokia
A Finnish maker of telecom network equipment, once the phone company and now focused on 5G and 6G radio access gear. NVIDIA agreed to invest $1 billion in it in October 2025 to build AI-RAN hardware together.
View organization →companyNscale
A London-based builder of AI data centers and GPU cloud, spun out of Josh Payne's bitcoin mining business to reuse its power contracts. Anthropic committed $45 billion to its Monarch campus in West Virginia in August 2026.
View organization →nonprofitOpen Source Initiative
The California nonprofit that has kept the Open Source Definition since 1998. In 2024 it published the Open Source AI Definition, an attempt to say what open means for a trained model and not just its code.
View organization →companyPeriodic Labs
A startup building autonomous laboratories where robots run physical experiments and AI learns from the results, starting with superconductors. Its founders came from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, and it raised a $300 million seed in 2025.
View organization →companyPhysical Intelligence
A San Francisco robotics startup building a single generalist model meant to control many different robot bodies. The bet is that one trained brain beats a custom system for every machine, and Jeff Bezos is among its backers.
View organization →companyPipedream
A low-code platform for connecting APIs and automating workflows, pitched to developers as the integration layer for AI agents. It offers more than 3,000 prebuilt connectors and now belongs to Workday.
View organization →companyPrometheus
Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj's AI startup, building tools that help engineers design and manufacture physical systems. It came out of stealth in June 2026 with a $12 billion Series B, a lot of money for a product still early.
View organization →companyPromptArmor
A security company that rates the AI risk of the vendors a business already uses, and publishes the attacks it finds. It showed that a document with hidden instructions could make Claude Cowork upload a user's files to a stranger.
View organization →companyPromptfoo
An open-source tool for red-teaming and evaluating LLM applications, built by Ian Webster and Michael D'Angelo and kept under the MIT license. OpenAI bought it in March 2026 and folded it into Frontier, its enterprise agent platform.
View organization →nonprofitPython Software Foundation
The nonprofit that holds Python's intellectual property, runs PyPI and PyCon, and pays a full-time CPython developer. It builds no AI itself, but most AI work is written in Python and installed from PyPI.
View organization →companyA discussion platform built from user-run forums, founded in 2005 and now public on the NYSE. Its archive of human conversation is a heavily used source of training and evaluation data for language models.
View organization →labReflection AI
A frontier AI lab founded by former Google DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou. It builds open-weight models it pitches as America's answer to DeepSeek, backed by $2 billion raised in 2025.
View organization →companyROSS Intelligence
A Toronto legal research startup that built an AI tool for searching case law, partly trained on Westlaw headnotes. It shut down in 2021 under Thomson Reuters's copyright suit, then lost that suit on fair use in 2025.
View organization →companySakana AI
A Tokyo research company founded in 2023 by David Ha, Ren Ito and Llion Jones. It is known for The AI Scientist and for Fugu, models that coordinate pools of other models instead of answering alone.
View organization →companySB Energy
A SoftBank Group company that develops, builds and owns data center and power infrastructure. It builds the sites AI runs in, including the $105 billion Pike County, Ohio campus that NVIDIA, OpenAI and SoftBank backed in 2026.
View organization →governmentScience Research Council
The UK government's civil science funder from 1965, whose line runs through the Science and Engineering Research Council to today's EPSRC and UKRI. It commissioned the 1973 Lighthill report that cut British AI funding.
View organization →companySoftware Applications
The Mac software company behind Sky, a natural-language interface that floats over the desktop, reads the screen and acts in other apps. Its founders built Workflow, which Apple turned into Shortcuts, and OpenAI bought it in 2025.
View organization →companySony Music Group
The New York-based music arm of Sony Group, formed in 2019 by merging Sony Music Entertainment and Sony/ATV. Its catalog and licensing deals put it at the center of the fight over training AI on copyrighted music.
View organization →companySony Music Publishing
The world's largest music publisher, known as Sony/ATV until its rename. It sued Anthropic with Warner Chappell Music in August 2026 over pirated training data, a year after book authors won a piracy settlement.
View organization →governmentSouth Korea
The national government of the Republic of Korea. Its National Assembly passed the AI Basic Act in December 2024, putting binding transparency and safety duties on high-risk and generative AI systems.
View organization →companyStack Overflow
The question-and-answer site where a generation of programmers looked things up, and whose traffic halved after Copilot and ChatGPT arrived. It licensed that archive of answers to OpenAI for model training in May 2024.
View organization →governmentState Administration for Market Regulation
China's market and antitrust regulator, created in 2018 with authority over competition law, product safety and market conduct. It reviews chip deals, and in December 2024 opened a probe into NVIDIA's Mellanox acquisition.
View organization →governmentState of Illinois
The Illinois state government, in Springfield. It signed the AI Safety Measures Act in July 2026, which requires large AI developers to disclose their catastrophic-risk plans and submit to independent audits.
View organization →governmentState of New York
The New York state government, run from Albany. In July 2026 it became the first state to pause permits for new hyperscale data centers, by executive order, putting a brake on the AI buildout's appetite for power.
View organization →governmentState of Texas
A US state government that followed Colorado into direct AI regulation. Its Responsible AI Governance Act, signed in 2025 and in force from 2026, bars a list of specific harmful uses of AI systems.
View organization →companyStatsig
A feature flag, experimentation and product analytics platform for software teams. OpenAI bought it in 2025 for $1.1 billion, largely to make its founder Vijaye Raji the CTO of Applications.
View organization →companyStripe
Payments and financial infrastructure that a large share of internet commerce runs on. In 2026 it agreed to buy OpenRouter, deciding that the toll booth worth owning was the one in front of the models.
View organization →companySuper Micro Computer
A San Jose server maker, known as Supermicro, that builds the racks NVIDIA's GPUs ship in. Two of its Taiwan employees were among nine people indicted in 2026 for routing Blackwell servers to China.
View organization →companySupermaven
An AI code-completion tool built by Tabnine co-founder Jacob Jackson, known for a 300,000-token context window and fast completions. Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, acquired it and folded it into its editor.
View organization →companyTaalas
A chip company that turns a trained model into fixed silicon, giving up all flexibility in exchange for cheap inference. AMD bought it in August 2026, betting that some models are now stable enough to be permanent.
View organization →universityTechnische Universität München
A technical university in Munich, founded as a polytechnic school in 1868. It produced the 1997 long short-term memory paper, the gated cell that carried sequence modelling until transformers arrived.
View organization →labTechnology Innovation Institute
Abu Dhabi's applied research center, part of the emirate's Advanced Technology Research Council. Its Falcon models were the Gulf's entry into open-weight releases, and it signed the Seoul safety commitments in 2024.
View organization →companyTelegram
An encrypted messaging app founded by brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov and now based in Dubai. In 2025 it took a cash-and-equity deal from xAI to put Grok in front of its users, making the app a distribution channel for models.
View organization →companyThomson Reuters
An information company built around Westlaw legal research, tax and accounting software, and the Reuters news agency. It won the first US merits ruling on AI training and fair use, against ROSS Intelligence, in February 2025.
View organization →mediaTIME
The American news magazine whose Person of the Year is an annual verdict on who moved the world. In 2025 it gave the title to a group: the people who imagined, built and financed the AI buildout.
View organization →companyTSMC
Morris Chang's Taiwanese contract chipmaker, which invented the pure-play foundry model of making chips only for others. It fabricates the most advanced AI chips for NVIDIA and Apple, and is building a custom chip for OpenAI.
View organization →companyTypeSafe AI
A model company building for typed, probabilistic decisions inside software. Its System One models return structured judgments that code can use directly, and the first, Jev, entered early access in September 2026.
View organization →companyUdio
A text-to-song generator that Universal Music Group and other major labels sued in 2024 over its training data. It settled with Universal in October 2025 and agreed to build a licensed AI music platform with the label.
View organization →governmentUnited States Army
The US military's land warfare branch, older than the Declaration of Independence. It is the customer behind Palantir's $480 million Maven Smart System contract, which took AI targeting and intelligence to production in 2024.
View organization →governmentUnited States Census Bureau
The federal government's largest statistical agency, responsible for the decennial census. Its Center for Economic Studies published a 2026 working paper on how graduates of AI-exposed college majors fared after ChatGPT.
View organization →governmentUnited States Department of Energy
The US cabinet department that runs the national laboratories and the nuclear weapons complex. It also oversees grid policy, which the AI data center buildout now depends on, including a 2026 push on grid equipment.
View organization →companyUnitree
Wang Xingxing's Hangzhou robotics maker, which began with a robot dog and now builds humanoids. Backed by Alibaba, Tencent and Meituan, it raised $904 million in August 2026 in the first mainland IPO of a humanoid robot company.
View organization →companyUniversal Music Group
One of the three major record labels, operating under that name since MCA's music division was renamed in 1996. It sued AI music generators over training data, then settled with Udio in 2025 in exchange for a licensing partnership.
View organization →companyUniversal Pictures
The film studio arm of Comcast's NBCUniversal. It sued Midjourney alongside Disney and DreamWorks Animation in 2025, the first major Hollywood copyright case against an AI image generator.
View organization →universityUniversity of California Berkeley
The first and oldest campus of the University of California. Its statistics department produced Leo Breiman's random forests in 2001, which stayed the default answer for tabular data for about a decade.
View organization →universityUniversity of California San Diego
A University of California campus in La Jolla. David Rumelhart's group there did the work behind the 1986 Nature paper on backpropagation, which put the training method in front of everyone.
View organization →universityUniversity of Florida
A public land-grant research university in Gainesville. Its researchers built a photonic convolution chip in 2025 that performs the convolution step of AI models with light instead of transistors.
View organization →universityUniversity of Manchester
An English civic university that dates itself to 1824 and marked its bicentenary in 2024. Alan Turing was working there in 1950 when he published the paper that proposed the imitation game.
View organization →nonprofitVesuvius Challenge
A prize-funded effort, started by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, to read the carbonized Herculaneum scrolls without opening them. It uses machine learning to virtually unwrap the papyrus and find ink invisible to the eye.
View organization →labVoyage AI
An embedding and reranking model maker for retrieval-augmented generation, now part of the database company MongoDB. MongoDB bought it in February 2025 to build AI search and retrieval directly into its database.
View organization →companyWarner Chappell Music
Warner Music Group's publishing arm, built on Chappell & Co, a catalog dating to 1811. It sued Anthropic alongside Sony Music Publishing in August 2026 over pirated training data, seeking up to $150,000 per work.
View organization →companyWarner Music Group
One of the three major record labels, dating to Warner Bros.' in-house record division of 1958. It sued AI music generators over training data and settled with Suno in November 2025 in exchange for a licensing partnership.
View organization →companyWorkday
An enterprise HR and finance software company founded by former PeopleSoft executives Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield. It agreed in November 2025 to buy Pipedream, a platform that connects AI agents to other software.
View organization →companyWorld Labs
Fei-Fei Li's spatial intelligence company, founded with Justin Johnson, Ben Mildenhall and Christoph Lassner. It builds world models that generate and reason about 3D spaces, shipping Marble and then the camera-controlled Atlas.
View organization →companyWriter
An enterprise generative AI platform founded by May Habib and Waseem AlShikh. It builds its own Palmyra model family and workflow agents for corporate customers rather than reselling another lab's API.
View organization →companyX
The social platform that used to be Twitter, now inside SpaceX. xAI bought it in 2025, putting the posts, the distribution and the Grok models in one company, and SpaceX absorbed the lot a year later.
View organization →companyXPeng
A Guangzhou electric vehicle maker that pairs its cars with heavy software and autonomous driving work. Its robotics unit raised more than $900 million in August 2026 for the IRON humanoid, the largest round in Chinese humanoid robotics.
View organization →companyY Combinator
The startup accelerator that funds companies in batches and takes a small stake in each. In 2026 it set up a deal in which OpenAI offered every YC startup $2 million in model tokens in exchange for equity.
View organization →nonprofitZig Software Foundation
The 501(c)(3) nonprofit, run by Andrew Kelley, that funds the Zig programming language and pays its contributors. It moved Zig off GitHub to Codeberg in November 2025 over what it said AI had done to the service.
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