Max Tegmark Is One of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI

Max Tegmark, MIT professor and founder of the Future of Life Institute (FLI), has been named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI, as he continues to warn that the AI industry is not doing enough to protect against potential harms. FLI's AI Safety Index, released this summer, gave top-scoring Anthropic a C+ grade, and Tegmark noted an unprecedented shift in U.S. policymaking over the past three months, with lawmakers responding to public concerns about job security, data centers, and AI use by minors.

Max Tegmark still believes the AI industry isn’t doing enough to protect us from the potential harms of its increasingly powerful models. The MIT professor is the founder of the Future of Life Institute FLI , a nonprofit aimed at reducing the global catastrophic risks posed by AI. In 2023, FLI’s open letter https://time.com/6266679/musk-ai-open-letter/ urging AI companies to temporarily halt the development of systems more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4 garnered support from a number of high-profile signatories https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/ . And last October, it issued another letter, calling for the prohibition https://time.com/7327409/ai-agi-superintelligent-open-letter/ of the development of superintelligent AI. To the Swedish-American physicist, lagging regulation on the AI industry has built a “race to the bottom,” where firms overlook safety concerns in favor of fast shipments. But a rapid shift in public sentiment towards AI in recent years may change things. An American public increasingly wary about job security, data center construction, and AI use by minors could make AI safety a hot-button issue in the upcoming midterms—and lawmakers are responding with legislation. “I haven’t seen as much shift in U.S. policymaking in the past decade, as I have in the past three months. It’s been amazing,” Tegmark says. The organization also issues grades on safety and security to the world’s biggest AI companies, hoping to incentivize the relatively unregulated industry to establish some guardrails. And its scores have been unflinching: top scoring Anthropic earned a C+ on the nonprofit’s AI Safety Index https://futureoflife.org/ai-safety-index-summer-2026/ released this summer. Tegmark, who has met with lawmakers and advisers from both sides of the aisle, says, “From left to right, there’s this vast support for AI that cures cancer and complements and helps humans by providing useful tools we’re still in charge of.” At the same time, he says, “There’s this massive opposition to building AI that we don’t know how to control, that’s romancing our kids, that’s teaching terrorists to make bioweapons.”