Each December, TIME Magazine names a person of the year — someone who has most influenced the news and world, for good or ill. Last year, TIME chose President Donald Trump for the second time. The year before that, it was Taylor Swift, who many claimed saved the economy from a recession with her Eras Tour. In 1938, the magazine chose Adolf Hitler.
This year, TIME has chosen to bestow its award on not just one person, but a group of people: the so-called “Architects of AI,” comprising the CEOs shaping the global AI race from the U.S. With AI on everyone’s minds, embodying hope for a small minority and economic anxiety for a majority, per recent Edelman data, this tracks.
“For decades, humankind steeled itself for the rise of thinking machines,” the article reads. “Leaders striving to develop the technology, including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, warned that the pursuit of its powers could create unforeseen catastrophe […] This year, the debate about how to wield AI responsibly gave way to a sprint to deploy it as fast 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’s Fei-Fei Li — all individuals who raced “both beside and against each other.”
TIME writes that these individuals, through their multi-billion-dollar bets on “one of the biggest physical infrastructure projects of all time,” have reshaped government policy, turned up the heat on geopolitical competition, and pushed AI adoption forward.
“This is the story of how AI changed our world in 2025, in new and exciting and sometimes frightening ways. It is the story of how Huang and other tech titans grabbed the wheel of history, developing technology and making decisions that are reshaping the information landscape, the climate, and our livelihoods… AI emerged as arguably the most consequential tool in great-power competition since the advent of nuclear weapons.”
TIME only announced the news on Thursday morning, but images of the cover photo were leaked on prediction market Polymarket on Wednesday evening.
