Each December, TIME Magazine designates a Person of the Year—an individual who has exerted the greatest influence on global events, whether for better or worse. In the previous year, President Donald Trump received this recognition for a second time. The year prior, the honor went to Taylor Swift, credited by many with preventing an economic recession through her Eras Tour. Looking further back, the 1938 selection was Adolf Hitler. This year, however, TIME has expanded the award beyond a single person to honor a collective: the “Architects of AI,” a group of CEOs leading the worldwide artificial intelligence race from the United States.

This choice aligns with the current moment, as AI dominates public discourse—representing a source of hope for a small segment of the population while fueling economic concerns for the majority, according to recent Edelman data. “For decades, humankind steeled itself for the rise of thinking machines,” notes the accompanying article. “Leaders striving to develop the technology, including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, warned that the pursuit of its powers could create unforeseen catastrophe […] This year, the debate about how to wield AI responsibly gave way to a sprint to deploy it as fast as possible.”

Based on one of TIME’s two cover images, key figures in this group appear to include Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Tesla’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, AMD’s Lisa Su, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, and World Labs’ Fei-Fei Li—individuals who have raced “both beside and against each other.”

TIME explains that through multibillion-dollar investments in what it calls “one of the biggest physical infrastructure projects of all time,” these leaders have reshaped government policy, intensified geopolitical rivalries, and accelerated the adoption of AI. This is the story of how AI transformed our world in 2025—in ways that are new, exciting, and at times unsettling. It is the story of how Huang and other tech titans took hold of history’s wheel, advancing technology and making decisions that are redefining the information landscape, the climate, and our livelihoods… AI has emerged as arguably the most consequential tool in great-power competition since the advent of nuclear weapons.

Although TIME officially announced the news on Thursday morning, images of the cover were leaked on the prediction market Polymarket on Wednesday evening.