TIME names the “Architects of AI” as its Person of the Year for 2025
TIME just announced its Person of the Year… and it’s not a single person.
The magazine selected the “Architects of AI” as its 2025 honoree, spotlighting the executives and engineers behind the year’s AI boom. One of the two covers features eight tech leaders perched on a steel beam — recreating the iconic “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photo from 1932 — including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, AMD’s Lisa Su, xAI’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the center, whose chips power many of today’s AI models.
The magazine frames 2025 as the year when AI’s “full potential roared into view,” with data center constructions surging and companies crossing new valuation thresholds — while also noting growing fears of a bubble, debt-funded build-outs, and lawsuits over chatbot harms.
Prediction markets had been leaning nonhuman, with Polymarket (47%) and Kalshi (55%) both assigning the highest odds not to any one person but to “AI,” ahead of Huang, Altman, or even Pope Leo XIV, per Business Insider. Many of those bettors weren’t far off in the end — though that may be of little consolation given that the market for “Artificial Intelligence” on Polymarket resolved to “No.”
Indeed, the 102-year-old magazine has chosen a group of people or even a nonhuman concept before, as TIME has long defined the award as recognizing “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill,” according to former Managing Editor Walter Isaacson.
Across its selections since 1927, 20 awards have gone to groups or conceptual forces, including “The Apollo 8 astronauts” in 1968; “The Computer” in 1982, when TIME first broke tradition to honor the rapid rise of personal computing; “The Whistleblowers,” who exposed corporate fraud at Enron and WorldCom, in 2002; and “The Spirit of Ukraine” in 2022.
Previously titled the “Man of the Year” award until 1999, the accolade has recognized a handful of women so far — including Queen Elizabeth II in 1952, Angela Merkel in 2015, and Taylor Swift, the most recent female recipient at age 33, in 2023.
The magazine frames 2025 as the year when AI’s “full potential roared into view,” with data center constructions surging and companies crossing new valuation thresholds — while also noting growing fears of a bubble, debt-funded build-outs, and lawsuits over chatbot harms.
Prediction markets had been leaning nonhuman, with Polymarket (47%) and Kalshi (55%) both assigning the highest odds not to any one person but to “AI,” ahead of Huang, Altman, or even Pope Leo XIV, per Business Insider. Many of those bettors weren’t far off in the end — though that may be of little consolation given that the market for “Artificial Intelligence” on Polymarket resolved to “No.”
Indeed, the 102-year-old magazine has chosen a group of people or even a nonhuman concept before, as TIME has long defined the award as recognizing “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill,” according to former Managing Editor Walter Isaacson.
Across its selections since 1927, 20 awards have gone to groups or conceptual forces, including “The Apollo 8 astronauts” in 1968; “The Computer” in 1982, when TIME first broke tradition to honor the rapid rise of personal computing; “The Whistleblowers,” who exposed corporate fraud at Enron and WorldCom, in 2002; and “The Spirit of Ukraine” in 2022.
Previously titled the “Man of the Year” award until 1999, the accolade has recognized a handful of women so far — including Queen Elizabeth II in 1952, Angela Merkel in 2015, and Taylor Swift, the most recent female recipient at age 33, in 2023.
