Veronyka Gimenes Is One of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI

Aug 27, 2026Co-founder and Institutional Director, Código Não BinárioBooth is a reporter at TIME.Courtesy of Veronyka GimenesVeronyka Gimenes wants you to know AI can be used to fight back. In 2025, Gimenes and Amanda Claro, co-founders of the Brazilian advocacy group Código Não Binário, created TybyrIA, an open-source AI model for detecting anti-LGBTQIA+ hate speech. The model allowed them to categorize evidence at scale for a lawsuit against social media companies.The motivation for TybyrIA traces back to 2024, when a clip of Entre Amigues—a queer podcast produced by Código Não Binário—went viral. The clip, which discussed the Brazilian transmasculine identity “boyceta,” triggered an anti-trans hate campaign. Far-right figures mockingly shared the clip with their audiences. Gimenes says the resulting round-the-clock bombardment of comments and messages took a severe toll on the team’s mental health.Gimenes realized the scale of hate could provide the data for a “counter-attack.” But after manually sorting malicious comments proved too psychologically taxing, she turned to AI. Fine-tuning an open-source model allowed her to catalogue hate speech at a previously unimaginable scale—...