Edition 001 — Notes on what comes after intelligence
Welcome to the first edition of After Intelligence — a concise, editorial digest of the day's most important developments in artificial intelligence. Published once a day. No noise, no hype; just the signal.
TIME names the 100 most influential people in AI for 2026
TIME published its fourth annual TIME100 AI list, recognizing the figures shaping the direction of artificial intelligence. The Leaders category is led by the usual weight of frontier labs — Sam Altman, Mark Chen and Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Elon Musk, Dario and Daniela Amodei of Anthropic, and Jeff Bezos among them. Broader enterprise and infrastructure names feature too: Arvind Krishna of IBM, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Hock Tan of Broadcom, and Joëlle Pineau of Meta.
Notably, the Innovators cohort includes Azalia Mirhoseini and Anna Goldie, co-founders of Ricursive Intelligence — an indication that recognition is beginning to reach beyond the few dominant labs toward newer research teams working on how models reason. The list is not without controversy: critics noted omissions among prominent figures from the hardware side, a recurring argument about what "influence" in AI actually measures.
The broader signal, if there is one: the conversation around who shapes AI is widening — from the handful of labs that trained the models to the people deciding how they are governed, built, and put into the world.
Mandatory EU AI sandboxes come due
Under Article 57 of the EU AI Act, each member state was required to have at least one AI regulatory sandbox operational at the national level by 2 August 2026. That deadline has now passed, and implementation is the story of the moment.
The sandboxes are not optional innovation programmes — under the Act they become a formal supervisory mechanism, a supervised space where developers can test high-risk AI systems against the regulation's requirements before deployment. The practical challenges are already visible: uneven capacity across the 27 member states, questions about how cross-border testing will work, and how sandbox findings will feed back into the authorities that grant market access.
For founders and developers building in the EU, the takeaway is straightforward: the sandbox is now a real and expected part of the route to market, not a side experiment. If your product touches a high-risk use case, the sandbox should be on your roadmap.
Morocco and India move on a joint AI and language-technology commission
Morocco and India are establishing a joint commission on artificial intelligence and language technologies, the latest extension of a deepening digital relationship between the two countries.
The commission is intended to translate existing digital cooperation into concrete partnership — spanning AI, digital public infrastructure, and digital talent development, with language technologies a stated priority. There is a sensible logic beneath the headline: India brings large-scale deployed digital-public-infrastructure experience and a multilingual AI stack; Morocco brings a doorway to francophone and North African markets, and the language question cuts both ways as both countries sit on multilingual populations.
It is a small story on the world stage, but it reflects a genuine trend: AI cooperation is increasingly being built through bilateral state-to-state lanes, especially in the global south, rather than flowing only through the handful of Western labs.
That's the signal for today. If you found it useful, share it with someone who reads past the headlines. Tomorrow we do this again.