Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk are among the entrepreneurs who have “grabbed the wheel of history, developing technology and making decisions that are reshaping the information landscape, the climate, and our livelihoods,” the magazine said.

“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.”

One of two covers of the magazine is a take on the iconic “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photograph from 1932 that shows ironworkers casually eating lunch on a steel beam above New York City.

In the Time illustration, Mark Zuckerberg, AMD chief Lisa Su, Musk, Huang, Altman, as well as Google’s AI chief Demis Hassabis, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, are sitting astride the city.

According to the magazine, which is owned by Silicon Valley billionaire Marc Benioff, 2025 was the year AI shifted from promising technology to reality and when ChatGPT usage more than doubled to 10% of the world’s population.

“This is the single most impactful technology of our time,” Huang told Time, predicting AI will grow the global economy from US$100 trillion to US$500 trillion.

The magazine also pointed to AI’s darker side.

This year saw lawsuits alleging chatbots contributed to teen suicides and mental health crises, and job displacement loomed as more companies raced to replace human workers.