“For delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the possible, the Architects of AI are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year,” Time said in a social media post.

The magazine was deliberate in selecting people — the “individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI” — rather than the technology itself, though there would have been some precedent for that.

“We’ve named not just individuals but also groups, more women than our founders could have imagined (though still not enough), and, on rare occasions, a concept: the endangered Earth, in 1988, or the personal computer, in 1982,” wrote Sam Jacobs, the editor-in-chief, in an explanation of the choice. “The drama surrounding the selection of the PC over Apple’s Steve Jobs later became the stuff of books and a movie.”

One of the cover images resembling the “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photograph from the 1930s shows eight tech leaders sitting on the beam: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the CEO of Google’s DeepMind division Demis Hassabis, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, who launched her own startup World Labs last year.

Another cover image shows scaffolding surrounding the giant letters “AI” made to look like computer componentry.

It made sense for Time to anoint AI because 2025 was the year that it shifted from “a novel technology explored by early adopters to one where a critical mass of consumers see it as part of their mainstream lives,” Thomas Husson, principal analyst at research firm Forrester, said by email.

The magazine noted AI company CEOs’ attendance at President Donald Trump’s inauguration this year at the Capitol as a herald for the prominence of the sector.

“This was the year when artificial intelligence’s full potential roared into view, and when it became clear that there will be no turning back or opting out,” Jacobs wrote.

AI was a leading contender for the top slot, according to prediction markets, along with Huang and Altman. Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope whose election this year followed the death of Pope Francis, was also considered a contender, with Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani topping lists as well.

Trump was named the 2024 person of the year by the magazine after his winning his second bid for the White House, succeeding Taylor Swift, who was the 2023 person of the year.

The magazine’s selection dates from 1927, when its editors have picked the person they say most shaped headlines over the previous 12 months.

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Associated Press writers Matt O’Brien in Cupertino, California, and Kelvin Chan in London contributed to this article.