Organizations45 organizations
The institutions of the AI era
Who does what: the labs training frontier models, the platforms distributing them, the supply chain beneath them, and the institutes and agencies trying to understand and govern them. The startup tracker records funding; this page records function.
Data compiled as of July 2026. Corrections by pull request are welcome.
Frontier labs13
The handful of organizations training models at the frontier of capability.
OpenAI
est. 2015 · San Francisco
Restructured in late 2025 as OpenAI Group PBC under the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation; makers of GPT, the o-series, and ChatGPT, the fastest-adopted consumer product in history.
Anthropic
est. 2021 · San Francisco
Safety-focused lab behind Claude; pioneered constitutional AI, interpretability at scale, and the leading agentic coding stack.
Google DeepMind
est. 2010 · London / Mountain View
Alphabet’s merged research arm (DeepMind + Google Brain, 2023); AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini line.
Meta Superintelligence Labs
est. 2025 · Menlo Park
Meta’s frontier effort under chief AI officer Alexandr Wang; repeated reorganizations and a retreat from open-weight releases after Llama 4.
xAI
est. 2023 · Palo Alto / Memphis
Acquired by SpaceX in February 2026 and folded into a unified AI unit; its Memphis Colossus buildout now rents training capacity to rival labs.
Mistral AI
est. 2023 · Paris
Europe’s frontier champion; open-weight releases, a sovereignty pitch to European governments, and ASML as its anchor shareholder.
DeepSeek
est. 2023 · Hangzhou
Hedge-fund-funded lab whose efficient open models forced a global repricing of training-cost assumptions; V4 (2026) extended the run.
Alibaba (Qwen)
est. 2023 · Hangzhou
The most downloaded open-weight model family and the default base for fine-tunes worldwide, now split between Apache-licensed workhorses and a closed frontier flagship.
Moonshot AI
est. 2023 · Beijing
Maker of Kimi; K3 (July 2026), the largest open-weight model released to date, claims parity with the closed frontier.
ByteDance Seed
est. 2023 · Beijing
ByteDance’s frontier model group; its Seed models power Doubao, China’s most-used AI chatbot.
Z.ai (Zhipu AI)
est. 2019 · Beijing
Tsinghua spinoff behind the GLM open-weight line; became the first pure-play foundation-model lab to go public (Hong Kong, January 2026).
Safe Superintelligence
est. 2024 · Palo Alto / Tel Aviv
Sutskever’s deliberately productless lab pursuing aligned superintelligence directly; a July 2026 NVIDIA partnership scaled its compute an order of magnitude.
Thinking Machines Lab
est. 2025 · San Francisco
Murati’s lab betting on customizable, human-collaborative AI; shipped the Tinker fine-tuning API and its first open-weight model, Inkling, in July 2026.
Platforms & hyperscalers9
The companies that distribute AI to billions of users and rent the compute underneath it.
Microsoft
est. 1975 · Redmond
OpenAI’s anchor partner, holding 27% of the restructured PBC with model IP rights through 2032; Copilot across Windows, Office, and GitHub.
Alphabet
est. 1998 · Mountain View
The only company vertically integrated from silicon (TPU) through models (Gemini) to distribution; Gemini now also powers Apple’s rebuilt Siri.
Amazon (AWS)
est. 1994 · Seattle
Anthropic’s largest investor; Bedrock for model access and the Trainium-powered Project Rainier cluster for Claude training.
Apple
est. 1976 · Cupertino
The distribution giant that stayed cautious: on-device Apple Intelligence plus a 2026 deal putting Google’s Gemini behind the rebuilt Siri.
Oracle
est. 1977 · Austin
Reinvented as an AI landlord; hundreds of billions in contracted OpenAI capacity, though the Stargate buildout slowed and narrowed through 2026.
CoreWeave
est. 2017 · Livingston, NJ
The archetypal neocloud: crypto-mining castoff turned NYSE-listed GPU landlord; its bid for Core Scientific was voted down by shareholders in late 2025.
Nebius
est. 2024 · Amsterdam
Neocloud carved out of Yandex’s international assets; builds AI capacity for Microsoft and pitches sovereign infrastructure to European customers.
Lambda
est. 2012 · San Francisco
Developer-focused GPU cloud for training and inference; a multibillion-dollar Microsoft supply deal moved it into hyperscale territory.
Crusoe
est. 2018 · Denver
Energy-first datacenter developer that builds power alongside compute; anchor builder of the Abilene, Texas Stargate campus.
Semiconductors & supply chain9
The physical chokepoints of the AI economy.
NVIDIA
est. 1993 · Santa Clara
Supplies the overwhelming majority of AI training compute; CUDA remains the industry’s deepest moat.
TSMC
est. 1987 · Hsinchu, Taiwan
Fabricates essentially every leading-edge AI chip; the single point of failure in the global supply chain.
AMD
est. 1969 · Santa Clara
The credible second source; OpenAI’s six-gigawatt Instinct commitment begins deploying MI450 at scale in late 2026.
ASML
est. 1984 · Veldhoven, Netherlands
Monopoly maker of the EUV lithography machines below every advanced node; export-control linchpin.
SK Hynix
est. 1983 · Icheon, South Korea
Dominates high-bandwidth memory, the binding constraint on accelerator production since 2023; holds roughly 60% of the market into the HBM4 era.
Samsung
est. 1969 · Suwon, South Korea
Memory giant and the only leading-edge foundry alternative to TSMC; racing to regain HBM ground with HBM4 and HBM4E.
Micron
est. 1978 · Boise, ID
The third high-bandwidth memory supplier; overtook Samsung in HBM share during the HBM4 transition, easing the memory bottleneck.
Intel
est. 1968 · Santa Clara
The US national-champion foundry bet: roughly 10% government-owned since 2025, with the 18A node reaching volume production in early 2026.
Broadcom
est. 1961 · Palo Alto
The quiet winner of custom silicon: co-designs TPUs, OpenAI’s in-house accelerators, and the wider wave of lab-specific chips.
Research institutes & nonprofits8
Organizations producing public research, evaluations, and open infrastructure.
Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)
est. 2014 · Seattle
Fully open models (OLMo) with released training data and code — the transparency benchmark.
EleutherAI
est. 2020 · distributed
The volunteer collective that kept open-source LLMs alive pre-Llama (GPT-J, GPT-NeoX, the Pile).
Epoch AI
est. 2022 · distributed
The field’s statisticians: compute trends, training-run databases, and FrontierMath.
METR
est. 2022 · Berkeley
Independent evaluator of autonomous capabilities; its task-horizon measurements track agentic progress.
Redwood Research
est. 2021 · Berkeley
Originator of the AI control agenda: techniques for deploying capable models safely even if they turn out to be misaligned.
Apollo Research
est. 2023 · London / San Francisco
Evaluates frontier models for scheming and deception; a fixture of pre-deployment safety testing at the major labs.
MATS
est. 2021 · Berkeley
The field’s main safety-talent pipeline; its research fellows and alumni staff much of the alignment and evaluations ecosystem.
Stanford HAI
est. 2019 · Stanford
Publisher of the annual AI Index, the standard reference for the field’s trajectory.
Governance bodies6
Public institutions attempting to measure, standardize, and regulate frontier AI.
UK AI Security Institute
est. 2023 · London
The first state frontier-evaluation body; renamed from “Safety” to “Security” in 2025 as its remit narrowed.
US Center for AI Standards & Innovation
est. 2023 · Washington, DC
Successor to the US AI Safety Institute (renamed 2025); voluntary security testing of frontier models and a 2026 AI-agent standards initiative.
EU AI Office
est. 2024 · Brussels
Enforces the AI Act; GPAI obligations began August 2025, while the 2026 Digital Omnibus deferred high-risk deadlines to 2027–28.
Cyberspace Administration of China
est. 2014 · Beijing
China’s internet regulator; administers the layered AI rulebook of generative-AI measures, model filings, and AI-content labeling mandates.
UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance
est. 2025 · Geneva / New York
The first universal-membership AI forum, paired with an independent scientific panel; held its inaugural session in Geneva in July 2026.
Frontier Model Forum
est. 2023 · Washington, DC
Industry body of the frontier labs; coordinates safety frameworks, threat information sharing, and anti-distillation intelligence.