Iin May, TIMEBilly Perrigo from traveled to San Francisco to meet with Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, one of the most important artificial intelligence startups in the world. Anthropic and TIME100 Companies, our annual list of the world’s most influential companies, were both created three years ago. The fact that Amodei and his company are on the cover of this issue speaks volumes about how quickly AI has become a top priority for the world’s largest companies, even those that are not themselves responsible for develop it. The rise of Anthropic, valued at $15 billion, also reveals how quickly influence can take shape. A lot can change and quickly: only seven companies list of this year’s TIME100 companies appeared in the 2023 edition.
Amodei and his colleagues have become both the creators of some of today’s most powerful AI technologies and, at the same time, perhaps the leading advocates in their field of a careful approach to development and AI exploration. “We’re not trying to say we’re the good guys and everyone else is the bad guys,” Amodei told TIME. “We’re trying to move the ecosystem in a direction where everyone can be the good guy.”
The second company on the cover of our TIME100 Companies is also relatively new. In 2020, artist Selena Gomez launched Rare beauty. Gomez recently led the cosmetics company to a $2 billion valuation as it became a regular subject of acquisition rumors (“I don’t really have any plans for that,” Gomez said to TIME’s Lucy Feldman) and a striking example of how individuals with vision and a strong following can continue to disrupt consumer companies. (If you need another example, please see our MrBeast cover profile from earlier this year.) Gomez’s message prioritizes contentment over beauty, and Rare boasts that it has raised millions to support mental health initiatives.
To select the list, Our editors, led by Emma Barker, solicit suggestions and applications from across sectors, interview our contributors and correspondents around the world and seek advice from external experts. No data point or financial metric constitutes a TIME100 company. Instead, we look at a mosaic of qualities, studying impact, innovation, ambition and success, all in the many different forms taking shape today. And as we say with our other TIME100 projects, we know that influence takes many forms, for better and for worse.
TIME100 Companies is more than an index of business success. It’s an argument about what corporate influence will look like in 2024. At a time when leadership in other sectors is under attack, surveys suggest many are looking to executives first companies to find direction. Whether it’s José Andrés Central cuisine of the worldCathy Engelbert at WNBAor Jensen Huang at Nvidiaeach one shows us how business can provide new models and inspiration for the future of humanity.
