TIME's 2026 Top 10 Most Influential AI Companies, ByteDance's Zhipu, Alibaba hold three seats

According to Beating Monitoring, Time magazine released a list of the top ten most influential companies in the AI industry, marking the first time the magazine has selected companies separately by industry. The ten companies selected are ByteDance, Amazon, Zhipu AI, OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, Anthropic, Alibaba, Mistral, and Hugging Face. Chinese companies account for three seats.

ByteDance made the list with its AI assistant Doubao, with weekly active users exceeding 155 million, and daily active users surpassing 100 million during the Spring Festival. CEO Liang Rubo said, “AI development is still in the early stages; we are currently only at the first 500 meters of the marathon.” ByteDance’s 2025 capital expenditure budget exceeds $20 billion, mainly going toward AI infrastructure. In 2026, it plans to procure an additional $14 billion worth of Nvidia chips, depending on U.S. export approvals.

Zhipu AI was branded by Time with the tag “doesn’t need Western chips.” Zhipu went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January this year, raising $558 million, becoming the first listed Chinese large-model company. GLM-5 released in February was trained end-to-end using Huawei processors, with 744 billion parameters. It has an open-source license; in some benchmarks it surpasses Gemini 3 Pro, and it is close to the programming and agent capabilities of Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2. Annual revenue is 724 million yuan (about $107 million), a year-over-year increase of 132%.

Alibaba made the list with the Qwen series. Qwen’s cumulative downloads have surpassed 1 billion times, and there are more than 200,000 derivative models. The list calls it “the world’s most popular open-source model family.” Airbnb uses Qwen for AI customer service, and Pinterest uses Qwen to analyze visual content. CEO Wu Yongming proposed that within five years, the combined cloud and AI external revenue should exceed $100 billion.

The other seven companies: Amazon (Trainium chip clusters, while also investing in Anthropic and OpenAI), OpenAI (weekly active users exceeding 900 million, monthly revenue of $2 billion), Alphabet (annual revenue first surpassing $400 billion), Meta (record-breaking AI-driven advertising revenue), Anthropic (after refusing the Pentagon’s request to loosen restrictions, customers increased instead), Mistral (annualized revenue of $400 million; the French military has already signed a framework agreement), and Hugging Face (hosting more than 2 million models and 500,000 datasets).