Announcing the 2026 100 Women in AI
A little over a year ago, we set out to answer a deceptively simple question: who are the women building the future of artificial intelligence?
When we launched the inaugural 100 Women in AI last June, ChatGPT had been in the world for barely eighteen months, and AI was already rewriting how we work, learn, govern, and create. Since then, that transformation hasn't slowed down. It has compounded. AI has gone from something most people had tried once to infrastructure that companies, hospitals, classrooms, courtrooms, and governments now run on. The adoption that used to be measured in pilots is now measured in production. And at every layer of that change, from the research that makes it possible to the policy that keeps it accountable to the companies scaling it into the real economy, women are leading.
This year's list is our attempt to show you exactly who they are.
The process of selecting 100 women
The 2026 edition of 100 Women in AI is the product of months of reading, debating, and deliberating. My colleague Chip Hazard and I personally worked through nearly 1,000 nominations submitted from across the industry: founders and researchers, operators and investors, policy leaders and technologists, nominated by peers, colleagues, and in some cases themselves.
We expected the bar to rise this year; we did not expect it to rise quite like this. The depth and caliber of the nominations represent more women operating at the absolute frontier, more women leading companies and shipping products at scale, and more women shaping the standards, safeguards, and discourse the whole field (and our society) now depends on. Narrowing that field was some of the hardest editorial work either of us has done.
In the end, we landed closer to 100-ish Women in AI. The talent was simply too deep to cut, so we expanded to 102 honoree spots. Several of our honorees build as cofounders so the 2026 list celebrates 105 women in total. We make no apology for the overflow. It is the most honest reflection of this moment that we could produce.
The 2026 100 Women in AI cohort, by the numbers
The women on this list are phenomenal. Here is a look at just a sampling of their accomplishments and depth:
The cohort spans four continents, six countries, and more than 18 cities, from the Bay Area, New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C., to London, Cambridge, Montreal, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Johannesburg.
Its researchers have been cited more than 1.5 million times in scholarly work, collectively.
One honoree co-founded Anthropic, which has raised roughly $132 billion and recently approached a near-trillion-dollar valuation. Beyond the frontier labs, honoree-founded companies have raised more than $5 billion in additional disclosed capital, and the cohort also includes the founder of the largest seed round in history.
The list includes four MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellows, a co-author of Attention Is All You Need (the paper that made modern AI possible), the creator of ImageNet, and a single honoree holding more than 200 patents.
Its members wrote the two most consequential AI-governance documents in the United States, the White House Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and built Africa's first multilingual large language model.
Just over a third are founders, and the rest span operators, technologists, researchers, investors, and world shapers, a reminder that leadership in AI looks like far more than a startup CEO.
These are not women working at the edges of the field. They are the ones building it.
A year of momentum for women in AI
When we conceived this list, part of the goal was to make visible a community that the industry too often overlooked. What has happened since has exceeded our hopes. Over the past year, visibility and community for women in AI have grown dramatically, not because of any single list, but because of a genuine groundswell. New communities, collectives, dinners, fellowships, demo days, and networks for women in AI have proliferated across the United States and around the world, and many of them were founded and are led by the very women you'll find in this year's cohort.
That ecosystem is the real story. A list is a snapshot, but a community compounds. We are proud to be one voice among many amplifying it, and prouder still of how loud that chorus has become.
Thank you to our supporters across the innovation ecosystem
A campaign like this doesn't happen alone.
To our global partner, Silicon Valley Bank, thank you for the support and conviction that took this campaign further than ever this year. Your belief in this community helped us reach more women, in more places, than we could have on our own.
To our event partners, Gunderson Dettmer and Citrin Cooperman, thank you for helping us bring this cohort together in person and turn a list into a celebration.
And to SignalFire, thank you for your partnership and for what is still to come. We are excited to collaborate on the State of Women in AI report (releasing this fall), which will delve deeper into the data, trends, and structural forces shaping this generation of leaders.
What comes next
ChatGPT showed the world what AI could do. The women on this list are deciding what it should do, and who it should do it for. That distinction matters more every month, as the technology moves out of the lab and into the institutions that shape ordinary life.
We started 100 Women in AI to make sure that, in a field defining the next century, the people doing the defining are seen. This year's 105 women make that easy. We can't wait for you to meet them.
Congratulations to the 2026 100 Women in AI.
