Foundation models Companies

Amazon is the American technology company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. Through Amazon Web Services it became a major cloud provider, and it has built its own AI models, chips and assistants, including the Nova models and Trainium chips.

A London-headquartered AI research organisation formed in 2023 by merging DeepMind with Google's Brain team, known for AlphaGo, AlphaFold and the Gemini model family.

ByteDance is a Chinese internet company founded in 2012, whose AI work includes the Doubao chatbot, the TRAE coding tool, the Seed model team and the Volcano Engine cloud platform.[^1]

Meta AI is the AI research and model-building organisation of Meta Platforms. Founded in late 2013 as Facebook AI Research, it produced PyTorch and the Llama and Muse model families, and it is separate from the Meta AI assistant product.

OpenAI is a San Francisco AI research and deployment company founded in 2015 as a nonprofit. It makes the GPT model family and ChatGPT and filed confidentially for an IPO in June 2026.

Anthropic is an AI safety and research company founded in January 2021 by former OpenAI employees. It develops the Claude models and products, and its Responsible Scaling Policy sets out safety levels for its models.

Apple is a US technology company founded in 1976 that makes the iPhone, iPad and Mac. It introduced Apple Intelligence in 2024, builds its own Apple Foundation Models, and in 2026 agreed to build its next models with Google.

Tencent is a Chinese internet company founded in 1998, known for QQ, WeChat and video games. Since 2023 its Hunyuan model line has been its main AI effort, later branded Hy.

Baidu is a Beijing-based Chinese internet company founded in 2000. It runs China's dominant search engine and develops the ERNIE model family and the ERNIE Bot chatbot.

NVIDIA Research is the research arm of the chipmaker NVIDIA, founded in 2006 with more than 200 scientists. It leads work on AI, self-driving cars, high-performance computing and graphics, and it builds the company's open Nemotron language models.

Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group and the developer of the Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) large language model family, which is released as both open weights and proprietary models.

Hugging Face is an AI platform company founded in 2016. Its Hub shares models, datasets and demo apps, its libraries include Transformers, and in September 2026 Nvidia agreed to acquire it.

A data company founded in 2016 that produces labeled and evaluated training data for AI models, counting OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft among its customers; in 2025 Meta took a 49% non-voting stake for more than $14 billion.

AI21 Labs is an Israeli AI company founded in Tel Aviv in November 2017 that builds large language models, including the Jurassic and Jamba families, and the Wordtune writing assistant.

Cohere is a Toronto-based enterprise AI company founded in 2019. It builds the Command family of language models, sells them to businesses, and in September 2026 signed a definitive agreement to combine with Aleph Alpha.

MBZUAI, the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, is a graduate AI university in Abu Dhabi, founded in 2019. It hosts the Institute of Foundation Models, which builds the K2, Jais and PAN model lines.

Skild AI is a robotics company founded in 2023 that builds a general-purpose robotic foundation model, intended to act as a single brain across many robot bodies and tasks such as manipulation, locomotion and navigation.

Chinese generative-AI company founded in March 2023 that built the Vidu video model and now describes two lines of work: world generation models and world action models.

01.AI is a Beijing-based artificial intelligence company founded in 2023 by Kai-Fu Lee. It builds open and closed large language models, including the Yi series, and the Wanzhi enterprise platform.

xAI is an AI company founded by Elon Musk that builds the Grok models and chatbot. It was acquired by SpaceX in 2026 and has since been renamed SpaceXAI and then SpaceXSI.

Mistral AI is a Paris-based company founded in April 2023. It builds open-weight and commercial large language models, the Le Chat assistant and the Vibe coding agent, and it has grown quickly through several large funding rounds.

StepFun (阶跃星辰) is a Shanghai AI company founded in April 2023 by former Microsoft staff. It builds multimodal Step-series models and has open-sourced several of them.

Baichuan Intelligence (百川智能) is a Beijing AI company founded in April 2023 by Wang Xiaochuan. It released open-source language models from 2023 and later focused on applying AI to healthcare.

Sakana AI is a Tokyo research and development company founded in July 2023 by David Ha, Ren Ito and Llion Jones, known for evolutionary model merging, projects such as The AI Scientist, and Japanese-language models named Namazu.

The European AI Office is a body inside the European Commission that supports implementation of the EU AI Act and enforces the rules for general-purpose AI models. It was established in February 2024.

Microsoft AI is the consumer AI organisation Microsoft formed in March 2024 to advance Copilot and its other AI products and research, led by Mustafa Suleyman. It develops the MAI family of in-house models.

Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) is an American AI company founded in June 2024 by Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy to build a safe superintelligence as its only product, without releasing anything in between.

A public benefit AI company that introduced itself alongside its ESM3 model in June 2024 and whose team joined Biohub in November 2025.

A research institute of Abu Dhabi's Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, launched in May 2025, working from Abu Dhabi, Silicon Valley and Paris on open frontier foundation models including K2, Jais and PAN.

Ant Group is the company whose InclusionAI team released the open-weight Ling (Bailing) family of mixture-of-experts language models in 2025, including Ling-Lite and Ling-Plus, trained without premium GPUs and published under the MIT licence.

LG AI Research is the organisation behind EXAONE, a family of large language models it documents in technical reports and releases under its own EXAONE licence.

The Technology Innovation Institute is a research centre of Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Research Council that works across ten technology fields and develops the Falcon family of language models, releasing model weights, technical reports and its own licence.

Physical Intelligence is a company that develops foundation models and learning algorithms for robots, aiming to bring general-purpose AI into the physical world. It publishes generalist robot policies such as π0 and π0.5, along with open weights and code.

Google, part of Alphabet, works on AI at several levels at once: it designs its own TPU chips, trains large language models such as PaLM and Gemini, and brought its research labs together as Google DeepMind in 2023.

Meituan's LongCat team released LongCat-Flash, a 560-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts language model that activates roughly 27 billion parameters per token on average and ships with open weights under the MIT licence.

Sarvam AI is an Indian company building a sovereign AI stack; its Sarvam-M, a post-trained 24-billion-parameter Mistral Small released under Apache-2.0, reports large gains on Indian-language benchmarks.

Liquid AI is an MIT CSAIL spin-out that calls itself an efficiency-first foundation model company, arguing that models should run on local devices; its LFM3-Omni-2B is an omni-modal model published in October 2026.

Covariant is a robotics AI company founded in 2017 by researchers largely from UC Berkeley; in 2024 Amazon hired its founders and took a non-exclusive licence to its robotics foundation models.

An independent, non-profit AI research institute in Toronto, launched in 2017 with provincial and corporate funding, with Geoffrey Hinton among its founding scientists.

Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, launched in 2019 and co-directed by Fei-Fei Li and John Etchemendy, studies AI's opportunities and risks and houses the Center for Research on Foundation Models.

Langboat Technology is a Chinese AI company founded in June 2021 and incubated at Sinovation Ventures; it develops the in-house Mengzi model family and sells an enterprise agent platform and applications built on it.

A Chinese AI company founded in 2022 under Tsinghua associate professor Liu Zhiyuan, known for the MiniCPM on-device model series, multimodal and speech models, and the ForgeTrain training framework.

A Chinese artificial intelligence infrastructure company that builds the middle layer letting many models run on many kinds of chips, and also releases the open Megrez model family.