America’s Time Magazine named the architects of artificial intelligence as its ‘Person of the Year’ on Thursday (US time). “Person of the Year is a powerful way to focus the world’s attention on the people that shape our lives. And this year, no one had a greater impact than the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI,” Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs wrote in a letter.
Alongside the big announcement, the magazine also revealed two covers dedicated to the ‘Person of the Year’ theme. One of these illustrations featured OpenAI boss Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Nvidia CEO-President Jensen Huang among others. Although the cover doesn’t picture them, Time’s Person of the Year feature also turned the spotlight on two Indian-origin tech moguls in its coverage.
They are namely, Karandeep Anand, the CEO of the chatbot service Character.AI, and Sriram Krishnan, who is currently serving as the Senior White House Policy Advisor on AI.
Meet Karandeep Anand: AI chatbot platform CEO
Including a mention of the Character.AI CEO, ‘The Architects of AI Are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year’ article said, “Karandeep Anand, the CEO of the chatbot service Character.AI, says his platform has 20 million active users, mostly born after 1997, who spend an average 70 to 80 minutes per day there.
“To Anand, teens replacing older forms of media with AI is a good thing: “They have broken out of the doomscrolling world of social media.” But Character.AI has also been sued by several families for teen deaths; the company says that it has rolled out several safety updates including limits on teen usage.”
In a June press release this year, the chatbot service announced that Karandeep Anand had joined the company as the CEO. Even prior to his top-exec role, Ananda had spent nine months as a Board Advisor. Before his Character.AI switch, he served as the Vice President and Head of Business Products at Meta and worked at Microsoft.
According to his LinkedIn profile, he pursued BTech in Computer Science (with Honours in Data Science) at International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIITH). On the other hand, he got a Marketing & Strategy Certification from Northwestern University – Kellogg School of Management.
Who is Sriram Krishnan? Indian-origin White House AI Advisor
In its paragraphs dedicated to the Trump aide, Time wrote, “In Trump’s first week back in office, Sriram Krishnan—who was still awaiting his official government badge—was summoned to the White House to brief senior officials on a breakthrough unfolding half a world away.
“A little-known Chinese AI startup called DeepSeek had just released a model that was said to rival the abilities of American competitors. DeepSeek claimed it had built this model in mere months, using less-advanced chips. Its researchers appeared to have replicated OpenAI’s reasoning breakthroughs using far less computation, allowing China to erase the gap in a competition the Silicon Valley experts hadn’t considered close.
“Krishnan, one of Trump’s top AI advisers, felt both vindicated and alarmed. For the past year, the former partner at the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz had been preaching the urgency of winning the AI race with China to friends, colleagues, and podcast listeners.
“The US, he argued, needed to build as fast as possible, stripping away red tape to let American AI companies run free. To the tech leaders shaping Trump’s new AI agenda, news of DeepSeek’s breakthrough validated the case for acceleration. “It was a wake-up call that we needed,” says Dean Ball, who helped write Trump’s AI Action Plan, released in July. “It set the tone for the nature of the competition that we have ahead of us, and the speed with which we have to move.””
As per Krishnan’s LinkedIn profile, he is working on American dominance in artificial intelligence. Prior to his Trump admin job, he was a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Before that, Krishnan led product and business units at Meta, X and Microsoft.
