The Architects of AI are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year

This is the story of how AI changed our world in 2025, in new and exciting and sometimes frightening ways. It is the story of how Huang and other tech titans grabbed the wheel of history, developing technology and making decisions that are reshaping the information landscape, the climate, and our livelihoods. 

Racing both beside and against each other, they placed multibillion-dollar bets on one of the biggest physical infrastructure projects of all time. They reoriented government policy, altered geopolitical rivalries, and brought robots into homes. AI emerged as arguably the most consequential tool in great-power competition since the advent of nuclear weapons.

This article was reported across three continents and through dozens of conversations with executives and computer scientists, economists and politicians, artists and investors, teenagers and grieving families. It describes a frantic blitz toward an unknown destination, and the struggle to make sense of it.

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