AI company CEOs in 2026: who runs ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and 6 other chatbots

Who runs each AI chatbot company in October 2026?

This list of AI company CEOs changed at four of the nine big chatbots in 2026, and three new people took charge: Michael Nicolls at the maker of Grok, Jacob Andreou at Copilot and Koray Kavukcuoglu at Google DeepMind. We checked every name below against the company's own announcement, memo or leadership page on 22 October 2026. The orange dots mark those three. The page covers the people behind consumer chatbots, not chip or platform bosses such as Nvidia's Jensen Huang or AMD's Lisa Su. AI chatbot market share shows which of these chatbots people use most.

Mark Zuckerberg isn't on the chart because he's run Meta since he founded it as Facebook in 2004, which would squash every other dot to the right. Each date is the day the company named the person to the role, or the day it was founded when the founder has been CEO from the start. Every row below is as of 22 October 2026.

One of the pages is behind the news. Google DeepMind's About page still said the lab was "led by our CEO Demis Hassabis" when we read it on 22 October 2026, 78 days after Sundar Pichai's memo gave the job to Kavukcuoglu as a senior vice president. Trust the memo instead.

Which AI chatbots changed leaders in 2026?

Four of the nine chatbots changed who runs them in 2026: Grok, Copilot, ChatGPT and Gemini. The other five, which are Claude, Meta AI, DeepSeek, Le Chat and Perplexity, have kept the same person at the top for all of the year. Here are the four changes, in the order that they happened.

SpaceX bought xAI, the maker of Grok, on 2 February 2026, in a deal that Bloomberg valued at $1.25 trillion for the combined company, TechCrunch reported. Musk stayed on top, but most of the people who were under him didn't. By 28 March, all 11 of his xAI cofounders had left, according to TechCrunch. Michael Nicolls, a Starlink executive, became president of the AI business in April, Business Insider reported.

Microsoft split Copilot away from Mustafa Suleyman on 17 March 2026. Satya Nadella's memo put Jacob Andreou in charge of Copilot for both consumers and businesses, "as EVP, Copilot, reporting to me." Copilot now has one boss. Suleyman kept his title of CEO of Microsoft AI, and he now runs the team that builds Microsoft's own models.

OpenAI lost its No. 2 on 9 July 2026. Fidji Simo, who had run ChatGPT and OpenAI's other apps since 2025, stepped down to a part-time advisory role after a long medical leave, TechCrunch reported. Product strategy now sits with OpenAI's president, Greg Brockman.

Google was the last to move. On 5 August 2026, Hassabis became chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, and Koray Kavukcuoglu took over the lab as a senior vice president who reports to Pichai. Pichai's memo said Kavukcuoglu now oversees "Gemini model development, Frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams." Nobody holds the title of CEO at DeepMind now.

Who runs OpenAI now?

Sam Altman runs OpenAI, as its CEO. He's held the job since March 2019, when OpenAI's own post first listed him as CEO, except for a few days in November 2023. On 17 November that year the board said he "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board" and named Mira Murati interim CEO. It didn't last. He was back within the week, and OpenAI's return post opens with his line: "I am returning to OpenAI as CEO." Murati went back to being CTO.

Before he ran OpenAI, Altman ran Y Combinator. Paul Graham named him its president on 21 February 2014. In an interview with Vanity Fair, reported by Yahoo Finance on 5 October 2026, he said of a future stock listing: "if they're ever in tension, the mission is going to come first."

Altman doesn't run ChatGPT on his own. Fortune reported on 22 June 2026 that product strategy sits with Brockman "with Sottiaux leading core product and platform." Thibault Sottiaux is the man who used to run Codex. OpenAI says over 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT each week (7 October 2026).

Who is the CEO of Anthropic?

Dario Amodei is the CEO of Anthropic, and his sister Daniela Amodei is its president. The two of them have led it since it began in 2021. Neither has changed role since. Anthropic's first funding post, on 28 May 2021, said the company "is led by siblings Dario Amodei (CEO) and Daniela Amodei (President)."

Dario came to it from OpenAI. He was its VP of Research and helped build GPT-2 and GPT-3, and OpenAI announced his exit at the end of 2020. Our piece on why Dario Amodei left OpenAI covers the split, and Sam Altman vs Dario Amodei puts the two CEOs side by side.

Is Demis Hassabis still the CEO of Google DeepMind?

No. Demis Hassabis stopped being CEO of Google DeepMind on 5 August 2026. He's now its chair and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, and he still runs Isomorphic Labs, the drug discovery company. In his note to staff, Google published him saying: "I've decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM." He also wrote that AGI felt "close at hand."

Hassabis cofounded DeepMind in 2010, and Google merged it with Google Brain to form Google DeepMind on 20 April 2023, with him as CEO. He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for protein structure prediction." TIME reported that Kavukcuoglu had run Gemini work for months before the switch. Six days later, on 11 August 2026, Google said the Gemini app had passed 1 billion monthly users, 9to5Google reported.

Who runs Grok now that xAI belongs to SpaceX?

Elon Musk still runs Grok, as the founder of xAI and the CEO of SpaceX, which has owned it since 2 February 2026. Musk said in May that "xAI will be dissolved as a separate company, so it will just be SpaceXAI, the AI products from SpaceX." The account became SpaceXAI on 6 July. On 4 October he agreed to rename it again, to SpaceXSI, and x.ai now uses that name.

Musk is the last founder left. He announced xAI on 12 July 2023 with 11 cofounders, and all of them were gone by the end of March 2026. He also helped to start OpenAI in 2015, and OpenAI has published his emails from that year. Day to day, Michael Nicolls, a Starlink executive, leads the AI unit as its president.

Is Mustafa Suleyman still in charge of Copilot?

No. Mustafa Suleyman handed Copilot to Jacob Andreou on 17 March 2026, but he's still the CEO of Microsoft AI. He now runs Microsoft's superintelligence team, which builds its own frontier models. In his memo that day, Suleyman wrote that the new setup would let him "focus all my energy on our Superintelligence efforts." Andreou keeps a dotted line to him.

Suleyman joined Microsoft on 19 March 2024, when Nadella named him "EVP and CEO, Microsoft AI." He had cofounded DeepMind with Hassabis and later cofounded Inflection AI. So two of the three people who started DeepMind in 2010 shaped two rival chatbots. Copilot statistics has the usage numbers behind the reshuffle.

Who runs Meta AI, DeepSeek, Mistral and Perplexity?

Mark Zuckerberg runs Meta, and Alexandr Wang is the one who runs its AI. Meta's leadership page says Wang "joined Meta in June 2025 as the company's first-ever Chief AI Officer," leading Meta Superintelligence Labs. That lab's first model, Muse Spark, came out on 8 April 2026 (Axios). Meta then launched Muse, a separate agent app, on 8 September (Tom's Guide).

Liang Wenfeng founded DeepSeek in July 2023 and is still its CEO. He's rarely seen in public. The South China Morning Post reported on 28 April 2026 that he hadn't made a public appearance in more than a year. Arthur Mensch has run Mistral AI, the maker of Le Chat, since he cofounded it in April 2023 (our Mistral guide). Aravind Srinivas has run Perplexity since he cofounded it in August 2022.