Welcome back. The main thing happening today is TIME's new list of the 100 most influential people in AI. Live 12–3 BST. Here's your Order of Play.
WHAT’S HAPPENING TODAY
TIME has published its 2026 list of the 100 most influential people in AI, and the usual titans sit at the top.
The "Leaders" tier reads like a who's who of the frontier labs: OpenAI's Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Mark Chen, Anthropic's Dario and Daniela Amodei, and Elon Musk. Around them sit the infrastructure names quietly powering the boom, Broadcom's Hock Tan, Oracle's Larry Ellison and CoreWeave's Michael Intrator.
The list is stacked with people building tools developers rely on, Cursor's Michael Truell, OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger, Harvey's Winston Weinberg and Suno's Mikey Shulman among the "Innovators." Several are names that have passed through the etn studio!
China's presence is impossible to miss. Moonshot's Yang Zhilin, Zhipu's Zhang Peng, Alibaba's Eddie Wu, ByteDance's Liang Rubo and Huawei's He Tingbo all feature, a reflection of how central Chinese labs have become to the open-weight debate that's run through the news all month.
But it's the names that didn't make it that set social media alight. "TIME has done it again," one widely shared tweet scoffed, "apparently Paris Hilton is one of the world's most influential people in AI, but Demis Hassabis and Jensen Huang are not?"
The inclusion of Senator Bernie Sanders drew its own mockery, one user listing his AI "influence" as proposing the government seize every major AI company. TIME's defence is that the list reflects a "tumultuous" field, deliberately spanning not just builders but the politicians, labour leaders and critics shaping how AI lands. Whether that's a fair broadening or a reach for engagement is, as ever with these lists, the whole debate.
We're getting into all of it on today's show at 12 BST.
YESTERDAY’S MOMENT
The boys (sporting some great new Aston Martin gear) discussed how AI labs are handling security with Embroidery co-founder Zack Korman.
"There's a lot of alienation right now from the AI labs. They talk a little bit too much about misalignment, and then they forget to mention that they just sandboxed it wrong or they didn't monitor their agents." The result, he reckons, is a cybersecurity community that's turned more anti-AI than it needs to be. "The AI labs are going to continue pissing them off."
Watch the full clip below.
YESTERDAY’S BANGER OF THE DAY
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Luke & Ronan
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