Asger Risom
These are the people shaping the AI boom you keep hearing about.
Artificial intelligence is often discussed as a single unstoppable force, but its direction is being shaped by a relatively small group of powerful individuals. From startup founders to Big Tech CEOs, these figures influence how AI is built, funded, and deployed.
Here are the leaders and companies most closely associated with the current AI moment.
Startup power
Sam Altman is the cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Based in San Francisco, OpenAI helped push generative AI into the mainstream. Altman briefly lost his role in 2023 before returning as CEO days later.
Dario Amodei runs Anthropic, an OpenAI rival focused on AI safety and enterprise use. The company, backed by Google and Amazon, develops the Claude chatbot and is headquartered in the US.
Mira Murati is the CEO and cofounder of Thinking Machines. She previously served as OpenAI’s chief technology officer and was briefly interim CEO before leaving to launch her own AI venture.
Elon Musk founded xAI in 2023 after years of public criticism of OpenAI, which he cofounded and left in 2018. xAI’s valuation surged rapidly, while Musk continued to oversee Tesla and SpaceX.
Big Tech control
Demis Hassabis leads Google DeepMind, Alphabet’s central AI unit. He cofounded DeepMind before its acquisition by Google and now oversees AI research and deployment across the company.
Sundar Pichai is Google’s CEO and has faced scrutiny over the company’s AI strategy. By late 2025, Google’s Gemini models were seen by some as rivaling or exceeding ChatGPT.
Satya Nadella heads Microsoft, which has deeply integrated AI into its products, including Copilot tools and Bing search. Microsoft is also a major investor in OpenAI.
Mark Zuckerberg is pushing Meta aggressively into AI, funding large-scale model training and reorganising teams to focus on what the company calls “personal superintelligence.”
Chips, defense and dissent
Jensen Huang runs Nvidia, whose GPUs power much of the global AI industry. The company’s chips are critical to training and deploying advanced models.
Alex Karp leads Palantir, a data and defense-focused company closely tied to US government work. He has positioned Palantir as central to national security and intelligence analysis.
Yann LeCun, formerly Meta’s chief AI scientist, is a leading researcher and vocal skeptic of claims that large language models alone will unlock major breakthroughs.
Ilya Sutskever cofounded OpenAI and now leads Safe Superintelligence. He has questioned whether simply scaling computing power is enough to advance AI.
Mustafa Suleyman cofounded DeepMind, later launched Inflection AI, and joined Microsoft in 2024 as head of its consumer AI efforts.
Alexandr Wang founded Scale AI, which supplies training data to major AI labs. Meta acquired a 49% stake in the company in 2025 and recruited Wang to bolster its AI push.
Liang Wenfeng founded Chinese startup DeepSeek in 2023. Its R1 model gained attention in 2025 for delivering high performance at significantly lower cost.
