One of the oldest and most impactful media traditions is Time magazine’s Person of the Year title, first given to legendar y aviator Charles Lindbergh after his momentous transatlantic trip in 1927. In addition to individuals, Time has also named organizations and, on rare occasions, even concep ts, such as the “endangered earth” in 1988. The magazine has now identified “the architects” of AI as the most influential figure rather than a single individual as Person of the Year for 2025.

“And this year, no one had a greater impact than the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI,” Time Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs wrote in a letter to readers. This year, there are two covers: one is an artwork that shows the letters AI surrounded by workers, and the other is a painting that highlights the tech leaders: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, xAI’s Elon Musk, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, AMD’s Lisa Su, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, AI “godmother” Fei-Fei Li of Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI Institute and CEO of World Labs, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

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Interestingly, this is the third instance in the past 50 years that Time’s selection of the person of the year captured pivotal moments in the technological revolution, following “Personal Computer” in 1982 and “You” – indicating the digital communities – in 2006. Now that the age of AI has replaced the social internet made possible by personal digital devices, experts say this shows how rapidly and profoundly AI and the companies behind developing it are changing society (or how it’s perceived to be). The introduction of ChatGPT by OpenAI in late 2022 may have ushered in the current AI era. Indeed, it marked a change-point in the development of human........

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