This year's list further confirms our focus on people. One of the dominant AI storylines of 2025 has been the competition over people. Investors have poured hundreds of millions into startups, reflecting the perceived value of founders, and leaders of Big Tech firms like Meta's Mark Zuckerberg have reportedly offered nine-figure deals to attract prized technologists. Those hires, accompanied by frenzied rumors, have turned the once obscure competition over AI researchers into something that better resembles professional sports free agency. The stakes for beating the competition are so high that leading researchers are courted like NBA All-Stars.

As we were finishing this year's TIME100 AI, I had two conversations, with two very different TIME100 AI honorees, that made clear the stakes of this technological transformation. Sundar Pichai, who joined Google in 2004 and became CEO of the world's fourth most valuable company nine years ago, told me that introducing the company's billions of users to artificial intelligence through Google's products amounts to "one of the biggest improvements we've done in 20 years." Speaking that same day, Meredith Whittaker, a former Google employee and critic of the company who, as the president of Signal, has become one of the world's most influential advocates for privacy, expressed alarm at the dangers posed by the fact that so much of the AI revolution depends on the infrastructure and decisions of only a handful of big players in tech. Our purpose in creating the TIME100 AI is to put leaders like Pichai and Whittaker in dialogue and to open up their views to TIME's readers. That is why we are excited to share with you the second edition of the TIME100 AI.

What is unique about AI is also what is most feared and celebrated--its ability to match some of our own skills, and then to go further, accomplishing what humans cannot. AI's capacity to model itself on human behavior has become its defining feature. Yet behind every advance in machine learning and large language models are, in fact, people--both the often obscured human labor that makes large language models safer to use, and the individuals who make critical decisions on when and how to best use this technology. Reporting on people and influence is what TIME does best. That led us to the TIME100 AI.