Governor TIME Person of the Year made in California 2025-12-12 (web)

Citation

Office of Governor Gavin Newsom. “TIME’s Person of the Year was Made in California.” Press release, Sacramento, December 12, 2025. https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/12/12/times-person-of-the-year-was-made-in-california/. Read 2026-10-20.

Bottom line

• By December 2025, the Governor’s office says California is home to “33 of the 50 top AI companies”. Earlier releases said 32.
• It repeats the AI job-posting share: “15.7% of all U.S. AI job postings were in California”, per the 2025 Stanford AI Index.
• It repeats the VC claim: “more than half” of 2024 global AI startup funding went to the Bay Area. The release does not mention CalCompute.

Background

TIME named the “Architects of AI” its 2025 Person of the Year. The Office of Governor Gavin Newsom used the cover to promote California’s AI sector. The release lists eight people. One is Fei-Fei Li, who led the California Report on Frontier AI Policy 2025-06-17.

Key claims

• “California is home to the world’s leading AI companies and research institutions.”
• “The Golden State leads and dominates in AI innovation, trust and safety standards, and workforce development”.
• The release lists eight people. They are Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Lisa Su (AMD), Sundar Pichai (Google) and Sam Altman (OpenAI). They also include Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Fei-Fei Li (Stanford) and Elon Musk (xAI).
• Fei-Fei Li “led California’s Report on Frontier AI Policy to help guide Governor Newsom’s development of responsible guardrails for the deployment of GenAI.”
• “the state is home to 33 of the 50 top AI companies worldwide.”
• “In 2024, 15.7% of all U.S. AI job postings were in California — #1 by state, well ahead of Texas (8.8%) and New York (5.8%), per the 2025 Stanford AI Index.”
• “California is home to three of the four companies that have passed the $3 trillion valuation mark.” The release names “Google, Apple, and Nvidia”.
• “In 2024, more than half of global VC funding for AI and machine learning startups went to companies in the Bay Area.”
• The state works with tech companies “to prepare the innovators of tomorrow.” It names two research institutes: BAIR at Berkeley and SAIL at Stanford.
• Under “Don’t just ask us, ask AI”, the release prints answers from Grok, Gemini and ChatGPT. The Grok answer says “32 of the world’s top 50 AI firms”.

Evidence and method

A government press release. It names the 2025 Stanford AI Index for the job-posting figures. Its other links go through a mailing-list tracker, so their targets do not show. The release lists forbes.com, cbinsights.com, techcrunch.com, gsv.ventures and news.stanford.edu as sources for the AI answers.

Limits

• No CalCompute content.
• The source for “33 of the 50” does not show. It is probably the Forbes AI 50, as in the March 2025 release. The release does not say so.
• The release quotes chatbot answers as support. These are not evidence.
• Company values next to each name have no date or source.

⚠️ Contradiction: This release says “33 of the 50 top AI companies”. The Governor’s releases of March 12, March 18 and September 29, 2025 say 32 (Governor ICYMI 32 of top 50 AI companies 2025-03-12 (web), Governor AI working group release 2025-03-18, Newsom SB-53 signing release 2025-09-29). The figure probably follows a newer list. Use 33 with the date and the list year.

⚠️ Contradiction: Inside this release, the Grok answer says “32 of the world’s top 50 AI firms”. The release’s own text says 33.