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Frontier AI Lab Tracker

September 2025

A curated listing of known frontier AI labs. A page in progress.

Some considerations:
- Teams training the largest models by compute
- Teams publishing frontier research
- Teams operating with independent safety/governance controls


• Ai2: The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence — https://allenai.org — Seattle, USA — Develops foundational AI research through large-scale open models, data, robotics, conservation, and beyond.

• AI21 Labs — https://www.ai21.com — Tel Aviv, Israel — Developer of large language models and long-context NLP tooling for writing and knowledge work.

• Aleph Alpha — https://aleph-alpha.com/research/ — Heidelberg, Germany — European lab whose mission-driven research builds scalable, interpretable, and customizable systems for diverse domains.

• Alibaba DAMO Academy — https://damo.alibaba.com/ — Hangzhou / Beijing, China — Alibaba’s advanced R&D institute focused on large models, cloud AI, and applied industrial research.

• Alibaba Tongyi Lab — https://qwenlm.github.io/ — Hangzhou, China — Tongyi Lab was created within Alibaba Cloud to focus on foundational research and industrial applications of large models such as the Qwen (通义千问) series (including Qwen open source models), Tongyi Wanxiang (image generation), Tongyi Tingwu (speech-to-text), and more.

• Anthropic — https://www.anthropic.com/ — San Francisco, USA — Anthropic is an AI safety and research company dedicated to building reliable, steerable, and beneficial AI systems like its assistant, Claude and the Opus and Sonnet model families.

• Baidu Research — https://research.baidu.com/ — Beijing, China — Baidu’s research arm developing ERNIE and other large-scale multimodal models and search AI.

• Black Forest Labs — https://bfl.ai/ — Germany & San Francisco, USA — A leading frontier AI research lab, building the visual infrastructure for tomorrow.

• Cohere — https://cohere.com/ — Toronto, Canada & San Francisco, USA — Provides enterprise large-language models, embeddings, and retrieval APIs for production use.

• Databricks Mosaic — https://www.databricks.com/research/mosaic — San Francisco, USA — Focuses on efficient training tooling, open-model research, and infrastructure for training large models.

• Deep Cogito — https://www.deepcogito.com/ — San Francisco, USA — An AI lab that describes itself as building general superintelligence.

• DeepSeek — https://www.deepseek.com/ — Hangzhou, China — A Chinese lab working on frontier large language models.

• EleutherAI — https://www.eleuther.ai/ — Distributed / community-led — Open research collective that produces open-source LLMs, benchmarks, and tooling.

• Essential AI — https://www.essential.ai/ — San Francisco, USA — Essential AI is building an open platform to democratize frontier AI capabilities and accelerate breakthroughs globally through collaborative science.

• Google Brain — https://research.google/teams/brain/ — Mountain View, USA / global — Google’s core deep-learning research team advancing transformers, foundation-model research, and ML infrastructure.

• Google DeepMind — https://deepmind.google/ — London, UK & Mountain View, USA / global — Google-owned research lab focused on deep learning, RL, and ambitious science-level AI research.

• Hugging Face — https://huggingface.co/ — New York, USA & Paris, France / global — Open ML community and model/dataset hub that hosts and distributes many open frontier models and tooling.

• IBM Research — https://research.ibm.com/artificial-intelligence — USA / global — IBM Research develops open-source data tools, multimodal models, and technologies that redefine how we interact with AI.

• Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab — https://www.noahlab.com/ — China (multiple locations) — Huawei’s foundational AI research group working on NLP, vision, and multimodal algorithms.

• Meta FAIR — https://www.meta.ai/ — Menlo Park, USA — Meta’s research division that develops Llama-series models, multimodal systems, and social-scale AI research.

• Meta Reality Labs (Reality Labs Research) — https://www.meta.ai/ — Menlo Park, USA — Meta’s XR / AR / VR research and hardware arm that also contains significant AI work for spatial computing, sensors, and on-device models (prototype headsets, sEMG interfaces, digital twin/3D research).

• Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) — https://www.meta.ai/ — Menlo Park, USA — Meta's Superintelligence labs is a newly formed unit as of Summer 2025 focused on superintelligence and large-scale foundational efforts.

• Meta TBD Lab — https://www.meta.ai/ — Menlo Park, USA — As of Summer 2025, the TBD team is spearheading work on upcoming model releases including the newest version of Llama, the extension of models’ reasoning capabilities, and development of AI agents alongside other Meta teams per the Wall Street Journal.

• Microsoft Research / Microsoft AI — https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/ — Redmond, USA / global — Corporate research organization powering Microsoft’s model efforts (Copilot, Azure AI, and foundational research).

• Nous Research — https://mistral.ai/ — New York, USA — Nous Research focuses on the development of human-centric language models and simulators.

• Mistral AI — https://mistral.ai/ — Paris, France / global — European startup producing high-performance LLMs and commercial offerings for enterprises.

• NVIDIA Research — https://research.nvidia.com/ — Santa Clara, USA — Research group advancing GPU-driven systems, model architectures, and scale innovations used across frontier labs.

• OpenAI — https://openai.com/ — San Francisco, USA — OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company building safe and broadly beneficial artificial general intelligence to help solve humanity's greatest challenges.

• PleIAs — https://pleias.fr/ — Paris, France — PleIAs builds energy-efficient, open-data foundation LLMs and explainable, locally deployable AI assistants for information-intensive, highly regulated industries.

• Reflection AI — https://reflection.ai/ — NYC & San Francisco, USA — Reflection is building open superintelligence with open weight models that are accessible to all.

• Safe Superintelligence Inc. — https://openai.com/ — Palo Alto, USA & Tel Aviv, Israel — The world’s first straight-shot SSI lab, with one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence.

• Sakana AI — https://sakana.ai/ — Japan — Building a world-class AI lab in Japan to develop AI solutions for Japan’s needs, and democratize AI in Japan.

• Samsung Research (AI Centers) — https://research.samsung.com/ — Seoul, Korea / global — Samsung’s research hubs focused on generative AI, on-device models, and multimodal systems.

• Stability AI — https://stability.ai/ — London, UK — Open-source focused generative AI company (Stable Diffusion) that releases image, video, and multimodal models and tooling.

• Tencent AI Lab — https://ailab.tencent.com/ailab/en/index/ — Shenzhen, China — Tencent’s AI research organization developing large models, multimodal AI, and application-focused research.

• Thinking Machines Lab — https://thinkingmachines.ai/ — San Francisco, USA — A research and product company building more understandable and customizable AI systems.

• xAI — https://x.ai/ — Palo Alto, USA — Elon Musk–backed company building large-scale language models and consumer-facing assistants (e.g., Grok).

• Yandex Research / Yandex AI — https://research.yandex.com/ — Moscow, Russia — Yandex’s research teams working on large models, search AI, and multimodal systems.

• Z.ai — https://z.ai/ — Beijing, China — Z.ai (Zhipu AI) is the AI lab behind GLM family of models, dedicated to inspiring the development of AGI to benefit humanity.

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