Time magazine has named the “Architects of AI” as its 2025 Person of the Year, spotlighting the tech leaders whose innovations are rapidly reshaping global society.

The group includes Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and xAI founder Elon Musk—figures Time describes as having “grabbed the wheel of history,” steering advances that are redefining economies, geopolitics, and everyday life.

According to the publication, their work has “reoriented government policy, altered geopolitical rivalries, and brought robots into homes,” with artificial intelligence emerging as “the most consequential tool in great-power competition since the advent of nuclear weapons.”

One of Time’s two covers reimagines the iconic 1932 “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photo, depicting major AI leaders—Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Stanford AI scholar Fei-Fei Li—perched on a beam high above New York City.

Time, owned by tech billionaire Marc Benioff, said 2025 marked the year AI moved from potential to pervasive reality, with global ChatGPT usage more than doubling to reach 10 percent of the world’s population.

“This is the single most impactful technology of our time,” Huang told the magazine, predicting AI could expand the global economy from $100 trillion to $500 trillion.

But the recognition also arrives amid growing scrutiny. Time noted escalating concerns over AI’s risks, including lawsuits linking chatbots to teen mental health crises and rising fears of job displacement as companies accelerate automation.