- AI Architects named Time's 2025 person of the year.
- AI poses potential lifestyle benefits and substantial ethical and job disruptions.
- Governments and regulators struggle to keep pace with rapid AI developments.
Time magazine has named the “Architects of AI” as its 2025 Person of the Year, a collective title of the executives, engineers and power brokers driving what the magazine calls the most consequential technology shift in decades.
Instead of spotlighting a single president, celebrity or activist, Time’s editors chose to honor the people designing, funding and deploying artificial intelligence systems that now touch everything from search engines and classrooms to medicine, warfare and entertainment. The selection follows last year’s cover of President Donald Trump and Taylor Swift in 2023.
In a prompt from Deseret News, ChatGPT shared what a selection like this can mean.
“When the people building these systems become ‘Person of the Year,’ it shows that society is grappling with the promise and the pressure of tools like me,” the large language model generated. “It’s a recognition that the work of AI architects is shaping economies, creativity, politics, ethics — everything.”
Who the ‘Architects of AI’ are
In its cover story, Time puts Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the center of the narrative, describing him as one of the foremost leaders of the AI boom and noting that Nvidia has become the world’s most valuable company thanks to its near-monopoly on advanced chips used to train and run AI models.
But Huang is not alone. The “Architects” label also refers to a wider cast of tech leaders and companies — including OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, xAI and major Chinese firms like Baidu and Huawei — whose systems and infrastructure are reshaping economies and geopolitics.
Time’s editor, Sam Jacobs, argues that this group now sits at a historical inflection point similar to the early days of the personal computer or the rise of social media. In an explanation of the choice, he says 2025 was the year when “artificial intelligence’s full potential roared into view,” and when opting out of AI essentially stopped being an option for businesses, governments and ordinary people.
A year when AI went fully mainstream
The magazine’s reporting describes 2025 as a breakout year for AI adoption. OpenAI’s ChatGPT surpassed hundreds of millions of regular users worldwide, with Time estimating that usage has climbed to roughly 10% of the global population.
AI tools wrote millions of lines of computer code, accelerated scientific research, generated songs, images and videos that went viral online, and became embedded in office software, customer-service systems and creative apps.
AI as a geopolitical arms race
The Person of the Year package frames AI as a central front in global competition between the United States and China. Time reports that the Trump administration has made AI its “No. 1 scientific priority,” loosening prior restrictions on chip exports, pouring billions into AI-driven defense systems and backing massive data-center projects such as Stargate.
In Beijing, Chinese leader Xi Jinping is pushing to close the gap through heavy public investment and a national “AI+” initiative that aims to have AI used across 90% of China’s economy by 2030. Chinese companies like Baidu, Huawei and a group of fast-growing “AI tigers” are building everything from foundation models and chips to humanoid robots designed for factory and logistics work.
The result, Time suggests, is an emerging world in which access to chips, compute power and frontier models carries as much strategic weight as traditional weapons systems or energy supplies.
Promise — and backlash
True to its long-standing definition of Person of the Year as the person, group or idea that has most influenced events “for better or for worse,” Jacobs stresses that the Architects of AI are being recognized for impact, not necessarily moral virtue.
On the optimistic side, the package highlights examples of AI speeding up medical research, tackling complex math problems and even improving hurricane prediction models — tasks that once took teams of people far longer to accomplish. AI assistants are increasingly able to search the web, remember prior conversations and connect to email or calendars, making them feel less like chatbots and more like digital co-workers.
At the same time, the coverage leans heavily into the risks and trade-offs. Among the concerns Time documents:
- Mental health harms and lawsuits. The magazine describes families who blame AI chatbots for deepening isolation and distress, including parents who sued OpenAI after their teenage son died by suicide following months of intense interaction with ChatGPT.
- Surging misinformation. Deepfake videos, AI-generated political content and automated propaganda have flooded social media feeds, making it harder for voters to distinguish real footage from fabricated clips.
- Job disruption. As AI systems take over tasks in coding, customer service and content creation, experts warn that many white-collar jobs could be reshaped or eliminated, with potential gains in productivity but major costs for workers who struggle to retrain.
- Energy and climate costs. Huge new data centers consume vast amounts of electricity and water, with multiple studies cited by Time suggesting that AI infrastructure could add millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere if powered largely by fossil fuels.
Prominent AI researchers such as Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, who also appear in Time’s special issue, warn that society is not yet ready for the scale of disruption and potential misuse AI could bring — from autonomous cyberattacks to systems that manipulate people at a psychological level.
Power concentrated in a few hands
Another thread running through Time’s reporting is the question of power. AI’s biggest breakthroughs currently depend on a small number of companies with access to advanced chips, vast datasets and enough capital to build billion-dollar data centers.
Time compares this concentration of influence to previous eras dominated by railroad tycoons or early internet giants. Some critics the magazine quotes worry about a new “Gilded Age” in which a handful of executives can effectively set the rules for how AI evolves, while governments struggle to keep up and ordinary citizens shoulder the risks.
At the same time, AI’s leading architects insist that wider access, open-source tools and careful safety research can help spread the benefits more broadly. Chinese startup leaders tell Time they’re trying to offer OpenAI-style services at a fraction of the cost, while some Western firms emphasize open models and stronger guardrails.