This is not the first time the magazine has picked a non-human as its Person of the Year, and 2025's choice reflects the domination of AI in news, public debate, as well as modern anxieties surrounding the rise of artificial intelligence.
The “Architects of AI” have been named TIME magazine’s Person of the Year for 2025.
The magazine cited 2025 as the year when the potential of artificial intelligence “roared into view”... with no turning back.
“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,” TIME announced.
The choice is hardly surprising, as AI has dominated headlines this year, and many have expressed concern about its potential dangers. In the cultural world, the encroachment of AI on creative fields has been at the forefront of discussions, provoking heated debate and leading to calls for more safeguards.
All you have to do is look at some of the choices for 2025’s Words of the Year by various dictionaries to understand the widespread concerns regarding the reach of AI, the way it regurgitates copyrighted material and threatens cognitive capacities.
For example, Collins Dictionary crowned “vibe coding” (“making an app or website by describing it to (AI) rather than by writing programming code manually”); Cambridge Dictionary elected “parasocial” as its Word of the Year, highlighting the hollow, one-sided and “unhealthy” connections people feel between themselves and a celebrity, fictional character or an AI chatbot; and Macquarie Dictionary announced that 'AI slop' has been chosen by its committee and voted by the public as the Word of the Year.
“Person of the Year is a powerful way to focus the world’s attention on the people that shape our lives,” TIME editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs wrote in an essay explaining the choice. “And this year, no one had a greater impact than the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI.”
The designation of Person of the Year is reserved for “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse.”
Last year’s TIME Person of the Year was Donald Trump.
The magazine states: “It was hard to read or watch anything without being confronted with news about the rapid advancement of a technology and the people driving it. Those stories unleashed a million debates about how disruptive AI would be for our lives. No business leader could talk about the future without invoking the impact of this technological revolution. No parent or teacher could ignore how their teenager or student was using it.”
“Every industry needs it, every company uses it, and every nation needs to build it,” Jensen Huang, who leads Nvidia, told TIME. “This is the single most impactful technology of our time.”
TIME adds: “All this progress comes with trade-offs: The amount of energy required to run these systems drains resources. Jobs are going poof. Misinformation proliferates as AI posts and videos make it harder to determine what's real. Large-scale cyberattacks are possible without human intervention. There is also an extraordinary concentration of power among a handful of business leaders, in a manner that hasn’t been witnessed since the Gilded Age."
It continues: "If the past is prologue, this will result in both significant advancements and greater inequality. AI companies are now lashed to the global economy tighter than ever. It is a gamble of epic proportions, and fears of an economic bubble have grown. Trump captured some of our unease in September when he said, “If something happens, really bad, just blame AI".”
This year is the third time that the magazine has picked a non-human as its Person of the Year.
In 1982, the personal computer was selected as its “Machine of the Year”; “Endangered Earth” as its “Planet of the Year” in 1988; and the magazine picked “You” as its 2006 Person of the Year for the “revolution” of early social media users as content creators.
The magazine has bestowed its Person of the Year title annually since 1927.
