Time’s 2025 Person of the Year award goes to “Architects of AI”

Time has announced its 2025 Person of the Year – and this time around, it’s the tech leaders behind the AI boom, commonly referred to as “Architects of AI”.

This year, the historic award celebrates the great minds behind AI's rise, including the Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su, and Baidu CEO Robin Li, among others.

Some of the other industry figures pictured on the magazine’s cover include Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis of DeepMind Technologies. There are two covers prepared by Time for this issue: one picturing the AI leaders among scaffolding at a construction site, and another recreating the 1932 photograph "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper," which served as a symbol of American resilience during the Great Depression.

In an accompanying editorial piece, Sam Jacobs, Time's editor-in-chief, described 2025 as the year when “artificial intelligence’s full potential roared into view, and when it became clear that there will be no turning back or opting out.”

He added that this year, no one had a greater impact than those behind the development of AI.

“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,” Jacobs wrote on Thursday.

Jacobs called the selection the third in a series that has captured the key moments in the technological revolution of the past half-century. The two others included the personal computer in the 1980s and “You” in 2006, which celebrated the rise of digital communities.

Some of the previous winners included serving presidents of the United States, although Time itself explicitly says that “winning a presidential election for the first time does not guarantee one will be named Person of the Year.” Last year, the award went to Donald Trump, and the year before that – to Taylor Swift.

As seen in this case, the title is not necessarily granted to a single individual. In the past, winners also included classes of people like American women (1975), Ebola fighters (2014), and The Guardians (2018), as well as concepts like the Spirit of Ukraine (2022).

December is generally the time when publishers and platforms make their yearly selections in chosen categories.

Just last week, Apple Podcasts named its 2025 Show of the Year. The winner is The Rest is History, hosted by historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, which became the first UK-based show to be named Show of the Year.

And earlier in December, Oxford University Press shortlisted three contenders for the “word of the year” title, with the winner being rage bait and runners-up including biohacking and aura farming.