Caltech’s Anima Anandkumar Named to TIME’s 2026 List of AI’s Most Influential

A Caltech professor who helped build an AI weather model that runs tens of thousands of times faster than the forecasting systems that came before it has been named one of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence by TIME. 

Anima Anandkumar, the Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech, appears on the 2026 TIME100 AI list, which the magazine published this week as the fourth annual edition of its ranking. She is grouped among the list’s “Innovators,” and her profile was written by TIME’s Tharin Pillay. 

The recognition lands close to home. The day before the list came out, Anandkumar co-founded and launched Accelerated Understanding, an AI startup whose founders Reuters photographed in Pasadena in late August. She also leads the Anima AI + Science Lab at Caltech. 

Anandkumar’s research centers on what she calls neural operators, an AI framework designed to model physical processes rather than language. In 2022, working with a team from Nvidia, Caltech and other institutions, she helped build FourCastNet, an open-source AI weather model that proved far faster than the numerical systems weather agencies had long relied on. Her algorithms have since been applied to problems ranging from nuclear fusion simulations to the design of medical devices. 

Her path to Caltech ran through both industry and academia. She previously served as senior director of AI research at Nvidia and as a principal scientist at Amazon Web Services, and she earned her bachelor’s degree at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, her doctorate at Cornell and completed postdoctoral work at MIT. 

The new startup applies that same physics-first idea. According to Reuters, Accelerated Understanding — which Anandkumar founded with Benedikt Jenik — uses neural operators rather than the Transformer architecture behind chatbots such as ChatGPT. The company says its model handled 5 trillion data points in a single prompt during testing, a capability claim Reuters reported the founders made ahead of the Aug. 25 launch and that has not been independently benchmarked. Reuters also reported that the two founders declined an offer tied to the Jeff Bezos-backed Project Prometheus, described in an offer letter it reviewed as worth more than $2 billion, and continued building on their own.

TIME Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs wrote the introduction to the list, the magazine’s annual accounting of the most influential people in the field. TIME had recognized Anandkumar once before, with a separate 2025 TIME100 Impact Award presented in Dubai in February 2025. 

Anandkumar acknowledged the honor in a post on X, writing that she was “Honored to be named one of the 100 most influential people in AI by @TIME” and noting it came just after her company’s launch. 

For now, the through-line is the person: an inventor who spent a decade teaching machines to understand the physical world, recognized in the same week she set out to build that idea into a company of her own.