According to TechCrunch, TIME Magazine announced on Thursday, December 11, 2025, that its Person of the Year is not an individual but a group dubbed the “Architects of AI.” The honor goes to the CEOs shaping the global AI race from the U.S., including 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’s Fei-Fei Li. TIME frames their work as one of the biggest physical infrastructure projects ever, stating AI has become the most consequential tool in great-power competition since nuclear weapons. The magazine’s cover images were actually leaked a day earlier, on Wednesday evening, on the prediction market Polymarket. This group decision follows 2024’s choice of Donald Trump and 2023’s selection of Taylor Swift, with the article noting that recent Edelman data shows AI embodies hope for a minority but economic anxiety for a majority.
The sprint beats the debate
Here’s the thing that really stands out from TIME’s framing. They explicitly say the responsible AI debate “gave way to a sprint to deploy it as fast as possible.” That’s a massive, and frankly alarming, admission. For years, these very architects warned about existential risk and the need for careful stewardship. Now, the narrative has officially shifted. It’s not about *if* we should build it, but who builds it fastest and who controls it. The geopolitical angle is impossible to ignore—TIME is basically saying the Cold War playbook is back, but with GPUs and large language models instead of missiles. That’s a terrifying lens through which to view a technology that’s already embedded in everything.
Winners, losers, and the hardware play
So who are the real winners in this framing? Look at the cover. It’s a CEO’s gallery. The narrative power—and let’s be honest, the market power—is concentrated at the very top of the corporate pyramid. Jensen Huang smiling from the center is no accident; Nvidia’s hardware is the literal bedrock of this entire race. But this also creates a weird tension. TIME is celebrating individuals, but this technology is built by armies of researchers, engineers, and, controversially, vast amounts of data scraped from the internet without clear consent. The “architect” metaphor is sleek, but it glosses over the messy, collective labor that actually constructs these systems.
A cautionary choice
Let’s not forget TIME’s history with this title. Choosing Hitler in 1938 wasn’t an endorsement; it was a recognition of formidable, dark influence. Naming this group feels similarly ambiguous. Is it a celebration of their genius and vision? Or a stark warning that we’ve handed a small cadre of unelected tech leaders the “wheel of history,” as TIME puts it? I think it’s probably both. The article mentions reshaping government policy and the information landscape—that’s a polite way of saying these companies have more influence on daily life and global order than many sovereign nations. And that should make everyone pause. When the tools for competition are also the tools for control, where does that leave the rest of us?
