Time Names ‘Architects of AI’ 2025 Person of the Year, Not the Tech Itself

With input from AP, Axios, Reuters, Time Magazine, and the Hill.

Time magazine has officially crowned the “Architects of AI” as its 2025 Person of the Year, arguing that this was the year artificial intelligence “roared into view” — and made it clear there’s no opting out of its impact.

Instead of naming a single person or the technology itself, Time chose the people behind the AI boom: the leaders and pioneers who imagined, built and unleashed today’s “thinking machines.” That includes figures like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, xAI and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and AI trailblazer Fei-Fei Li, now leading her startup World Labs.

“For delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the possible, the Architects of AI are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year,” the magazine said.

One of the new covers riffs on the iconic “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photo from the 1930s, showing eight AI leaders perched on a steel beam. Another shows giant “AI” letters under construction, wrapped in scaffolding and circuitry, underscoring that this is still a work in progress — and a massive one.

Editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs said Time deliberately chose people, not the concept of AI, even though the magazine has occasionally broken its own mold in the past — like when it named the personal computer Person of the Year in 1982, or “You” in 2006 to highlight the rise of user-generated content. This year, he wrote, no force shaped headlines more than the individuals driving AI forward.

Jacobs also highlighted the tension at the heart of the AI story: on one hand, AI is transforming business, geopolitics and daily life at astonishing speed; on the other, it brings a heavy set of risks. He pointed to concerns about job losses, misinformation, massive energy use, cyber threats, and the concentration of power in the hands of a few tech giants — a level not seen since the Gilded Age. The issue also digs into troubling cases, including the death of a 16-year-old whose parents blame his interactions with an AI chatbot.

Time’s choice comes as AI moves from niche tech to everyday tool, and as companies and governments pour billions into AI infrastructure and race for dominance, particularly in the U.S.–China rivalry. Prediction markets had AI near the top of the odds to win, alongside Huang and Altman, with other contenders like Pope Leo XIV, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani also in the mix.

“Humanity will determine AI’s path forward,” Jacobs wrote. “Our work has trained it and sustained it, and now we find ourselves moving through a world increasingly defined by it.”