TIME magazine named “Artificial Intelligence Engineers” Person of the Year

Every December, TIME magazine selects its Person of the Year—the person who has had the greatest impact on the news and the world, for good or ill. Last year, she was chosen by TIME magazine President Donald Trump For the second time. The year before that, it was Taylor Swiftwhich many claimed saved the economy from recession with the Eras Tour. In 1938, the magazine chose it Adolf Hitler.

This year, TIME chose to give its award not just to one person, but to a group of people: the so-called “Artificial Intelligence Engineers” The CEOs shaping the global AI race include those from the United States. With artificial intelligence on everyone’s mind, it embodies the hope of a small minority and the economic anxiety of the majority, for everyone Edelman’s latest datathis tracks.

“For decades, humanity has empowered itself with the emergence of thinking machines,” the article states. “Leaders striving to advance the technology, including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, have warned that pursuing its power could lead to unforeseen catastrophe (…) and this year, the debate over how to use AI responsibly has given way to a sprint to deploy it as quickly as possible.”

Based on one of TIME’s two cover photos, some of those people appear to be 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 — all individuals who raced “alongside or against each other.”

With their multibillion-dollar bets on “one of the largest physical infrastructure projects ever,” Time magazine wrote, these individuals have reshaped government policy, intensified geopolitical competition, and pushed forward the adoption of artificial intelligence.

“This is the story of how artificial intelligence is changing our world in 2025, in new, exciting and sometimes scary ways. It is the story of how Huang and others have changed Tech titans Grabbing the wheel of history, developing technology and making decisions that are reshaping the information landscape, the climate, and our livelihoods… AI has arguably emerged as the most important tool in great power competition since the advent of nuclear weapons.

TIME only announced the news on Thursday morning, but images of the cover image were leaked on prediction market Polymarket on Wednesday evening.