On the evening of December 11 Beijing Time, TIME officially announced that its 2025 Person of the Year title has been awarded to "The AI Architects."
TIME stated, "In 2025, artificial intelligence's full potential has erupted across every sector, becoming an unstoppable force. These are the individuals who pioneered the era of intelligent machines—simultaneously awe-inspiring and unsettling humanity. They are reshaping our present while pushing the boundaries of possibility. For these reasons, the AI Architects have been named TIME's 2025 Person of the Year."
The magazine released two cover images for its special "Person of the Year" issue. One creatively reimagines the iconic 1932 photograph "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper," replacing the original ironworkers with executives from leading tech and AI companies. The cover features: Mark Zuckerberg (Meta Platforms, Inc.), Lisa Su (Advanced Micro Devices), Elon Musk (xAI), Jensen Huang (NVIDIA), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (DeepMind), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), and Fei-Fei Li (Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute).
The AI visionaries grace TIME's "Person of the Year" cover in a modern reinterpretation of the 1932 classic "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper," digitally positioned on steel beams high above the city. Like the construction workers who built the skyscrapers of yesteryear, they symbolically overlook the world they are reshaping—our collective future.
The original "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper" is a famous black-and-white photograph taken during the construction of New York's RCA Building (later renamed the GE Building) at Rockefeller Center in 1932. It depicts 11 men casually eating lunch on a steel beam 256 meters above street level, without any safety harnesses—a stark reminder of Depression-era desperation for work, safety be damned. Shot on September 20, 1932, on the 69th floor, archivists note the image was essentially a publicity stunt.
The parallel between the two eras carries profound historical symbolism: where 1932's workers physically built cities, 2025's AI architects are digitally constructing our future.