TIME revealed its Person of the Year for 2025, and it’s not one individual but the collective “Architects of AI.” The magazine’s cover recreates the iconic 1932 “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photo, swapping construction workers for the executives shaping today’s AI boom. Featured figures include 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 anchor the modern AI stack.
TIME frames 2025 as the year when AI’s potential finally broke into full view as data centers went up at breakneck speed and tech valuations crossed new milestones. But the story also acknowledges the darker side of the boom, including bubble fears, debt-heavy expansion strategies, and lawsuits tied to chatbot behavior.
Prediction markets had been betting heavily on a nonhuman winner. Polymarket gave “AI” a 47 percent chance of winning, while Kalshi put it at 55 percent, ahead of individual frontrunners like Huang, Altman, or even Pope Leo XIV. The bettors were nearly right, although Polymarket’s “Artificial Intelligence” market ultimately resolved to “No.”
This isn’t TIME’s first nod to a collective force. Since 1927, the magazine has chosen groups or concepts 20 times, from “The Computer” in 1982 to “The Whistleblowers” who exposed Enron in 2002, to “The Spirit of Ukraine” in 2022. And while the award was called “Man of the Year” until 1999, only a handful of women have received the honor individually, including Angela Merkel in 2015 and Taylor Swift in 2023.