TIME names ‘Architects of AI’ its Person of the Year
Every December, TIME Magazine names a Person of the Year: someone who has most influenced the news and the world, for better or worse. Last year TIME chose President Donald Trump for the second time. That was the case the year before Taylor Swiftwith many claiming that she had saved the economy from recession with her Eras Tour. In 1938 the magazine chose Adolf Hitler.
This year, TIME has chosen not to award the prize to one person, but to a group of people: the so-called “Architects of AI,” consisting of the CEOs shaping the global AI race from the US. With AI on everyone’s mind, embodying hope for a small minority and economic fear for a majority, per recent Edelman datathese traces.
“For decades, humanity has been preparing for the rise of thinking machines,” the article reads. “Leaders striving to develop the technology, including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, warned that pursuing its powers could cause an unforeseen catastrophe. […] This year, the debate about how to use AI responsibly gave way to a sprint to deploy it as quickly as possible.”
Based on one of TIME’s two cover photos, some of those people appear to be Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Tesla’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, AMD’s Lisa Su, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, and World Labs’ Fei-Fei Li — all individuals who raced “both alongside and against each other.”
TIME writes that through their multibillion-dollar bets on “one of the largest physical infrastructure projects of all time,” these individuals have reshaped government policy, challenged geopolitical competition, and fueled the adoption of AI.
This is the story of how AI changed our world in 2025, in new, exciting, and sometimes terrifying ways. It is the story of how Huang et al tech titans has seized the wheel of history, developed technology and made decisions that reshape the information landscape, the climate and our livelihoods… AI has become perhaps the most important tool in superpower competition since the advent of nuclear weapons.
TIME didn’t announce the news until Thursday morning, but images of the cover photo were leaked on prediction market Polymarket on Wednesday evening.
