Every December, TIME magazine names a person of the year — someone who has most influenced the news and the world, for better or for worse. Last year he chose TIME President Donald Trump for the second time. Last year, it was Taylor Swiftwhich many claimed saved the economy from recession with the Eras tour. In 1938, the magazine chose Adolf Hitler.
This year, TIME chose to present its award not just to one person, but to a group of people: the so-called “Artificial Intelligence Architects”, featuring the CEOs shaping the global AI race from the US With AI on everyone’s mind, embodying hope for a small minority and economic concern for the majority, per recent Edelman datathis piece.
“For decades, humanity has been working towards the rise of thinking machines,” the article states. “Leaders trying to develop the technology, including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, have warned that pursuing its powers could create unforeseen disaster […] This year, the debate about how to handle artificial intelligence responsibly has given way to a sprint to develop 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 Lidivide-Fedivideo Libssides against each other.”
TIME writes that these individuals, through their multibillion-dollar bets on “one of the largest physical infrastructure projects of all time,” reshaped government policy, intensified geopolitical competition, and pushed the adoption of artificial intelligence forward.
This is the story of how artificial intelligence has changed our world in 2025, in new and exciting and sometimes scary ways. It is the story of how Huang and others titans of technology seized the wheel of history, developing technology and making decisions that reshape our information landscape, climate, and livelihoods… Artificial intelligence has emerged as arguably the most important 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 afternoon.
