Artificial intelligence has impacted life in a big way this year. Time magazine recognized the revolutionary technology on Thursday, dubbing the architects of AI as its person of the year for 2025.
The award, announced on “Today,” recognizes the impact of AI and reflects how the technology has seeped into nearly every aspect of life.
The covers of the magazine show the people responsible for building and shaping artificial intelligence.
2025 was the year when artificial intelligence’s full potential roared into view, and when it became clear that there will be no turning back.
— TIME (@TIME) December 11, 2025
For delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the… pic.twitter.com/mEIKRiZfLo
One cover is a modern-day tribute to the famous “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photograph from 1932. It features many of the world’s top tech leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Lisa Su, Dario Amodei, and Fei-Fei Li.
The other cover also highlights the same tech leaders, but in scaffolding that spells out AI.
The announcement comes a day after Time honored WNBA star A’ja Wilson as its 2025 athlete of the year.
Like Wilson, AI’s impact this year has been seismic.
“This is the year we feel like the people who were designing, imagining and building artificial intelligence stopped debating about how to create this technology and started racing to deploy it, and there are enormous consequences for society,” Sam Guthrie, Time’s editor-in-chief, said during an interview. “This reminds me of the Gilded Age. I think never before since then has so much power been concentrated in so few individuals, and we know what happened then — amazing progress, but also incredible inequality.”
Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, told the magazine in a November interview that AI was a crucial new piece of technology.
“Every industry needs it, every company uses it, and every nation needs to build it,” Huang said. “This is the single most impactful technology of our time.”
In 1982, Time called "The Computer“ its Machine of the Year, or more aptly. It was the first time an inanimate object was recognized.
In 2006, Time named “You” as its Person of the Year in a nod to the World Wide Web’s ability to connect people worldwide.
© 2025 Cox Media Group
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