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, TIME magazine selected President Donald Trump for the second time. The year before that, it was Taylor Swift who many claimed saved the economy from recession with her Eras Tour. In 1938, the magazine chose Adolf Hitler.

This year, TIME chose to give its prize not just to one person, but to a group of people: the so-called “AI engineers,” who include the CEOs shaping the global AI race from the United States. With AI on everyone’s mind, the hope of a small minority and the economic anxiety of the majority, according to recent Edelman data, embodies this path.

“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 unexpected disaster. […] This year, the discussion about how to use AI responsibly has given way to a sprint to deploy it as quickly as possible.

Based on one of TIME magazine’s two cover images, 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’s the story of how Hwang and other tech giants grabbed the wheel of history, developing technology and making decisions that are reshaping the information landscape, the climate, and our livelihoods… Artificial intelligence has 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.