Time Names 'Architects of AI' as 2025 Person of the Year

Did Time honor the visionaries who defined 2025, or elevate the tech elites most responsible for the year’s upheaval?

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Time Names 'Architects of AI' as 2025 Person of the Year

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Image credit: TIME

The Spin

Pro-establishment narrative

In 2025, artificial intelligence moved from promise to reality, transforming society in every corner of daily life. The Architects of AI have delivered the age of thinking machines, accelerating scientific discovery, solving decades-old problems, creating trillions in economic value, and reshaping industries, work, and human potential. Their innovations have altered the present for better or worse — wowing and worrying humanity, and showing why understanding this moment matters more than ever.

Time

Jessica Sibley on X

Establishment-critical narrative

Time’s choice of AI architects as Person of the Year celebrates tech CEOs rather than the engineers and researchers who actually built the technology. These leaders have unleashed AI that disrupts creative industries, spreads misinformation, exploits intellectual property, and consumes massive energy. By elevating a marketing-friendly cast over the real creators, the magazine turns a technological revolution into a spectacle of power and profit that benefits a few while troubling everyone else.

Mashable

Conservative narrative

Charlie Kirk should have been TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year. He reached and inspired millions this year, shaping debates and mobilizing young Americans in ways no insulated tech executive ever matched. By choosing AI’s corporate figureheads instead, TIME made a cowardly, crowd-pleasing pick — overlooking the human impact that actually defined 2025.

The Post Millennial

Elon Musk on X

Nick Sortor on X

Cynical narrative

AI didn’t win Time’s Person of the Year — again — despite years of hype promising world-changing breakthroughs that always seem just one more demo away. Prediction-market true believers can rage all they want, but Time knows better than to hand the crown to a technology still struggling to deliver anything close to its mythos. Maybe someday AI will earn the title its boosters keep forecasting — but only if any of those fantastical promises ever materialize in the real world.

Gizmodo Polymarket