NEW YORK, Dec. 11, 2025 — In a move recognizing the technological force that has come to define the modern era, TIME Magazine today announced “The Architects of AI” as its 2025 Person of the Year.
Breaking from the tradition of selecting a single individual, the magazine highlighted a group of technologists, CEOs, and scientists who have collectively “imagined, designed, and built” the artificial intelligence systems that are now woven into the fabric of global society.
The “Point of No Return”
“This was the year when artificial intelligence’s full potential roared into view,” wrote TIME Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs. The selection acknowledges that 2025 marked a definitive transition: AI is no longer an experiment for early adopters but a critical utility—essential to national defense, economic growth, and scientific discovery.
“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,” the magazine declared.
A Visual Homage
The cover image, a digital painting by artist Jason Seiler, serves as a deliberate historical parallel. It reimagines the famous 1932 photograph “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper,” depicting the leaders of the AI revolution casually seated on a steel beam high above a digital metropolis.
The visual metaphor is clear: just as steelworkers built the physical skyline of the 20th century, these figures are constructing the digital infrastructure of the 21st.
Who Are the Architects?
The group represents the entire “stack” of the AI ecosystem, from the silicon chips that power the models to the applications that run on them.
Key figures highlighted in the coverage include:
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The Hardware Titans: Jensen Huang (Nvidia) and Lisa Su (AMD), whose advanced GPUs provide the raw computing power necessary to train massive frontier models.
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The Model Builders: Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), and Dario Amodei (Anthropic), the leaders pushing the boundaries of what “thinking machines” can reason and create.
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The Integrators: Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) and Elon Musk (xAI), who have aggressively integrated AI into vast social networks and physical systems.
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The Scientists: Fei-Fei Li (World Labs), often called the “godmother of AI,” representing the researchers working to give AI spatial intelligence and scientific grounding.
A Year of Consequence
The choice follows Donald Trump, who was named Person of the Year in 2024. TIME notes that while politics remains volatile, the impact of AI is systemic and irreversible. The cover story delves into the profound challenges this group has unleashed, including the skyrocketing energy demands of data centers, the disruption of labor markets, and the intensifying geopolitical arms race for compute dominance.
As Jensen Huang told TIME, “Every industry needs it, every company uses it, and every nation needs to build it.” In 2025, that prediction became reality.
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