Empire of AI

Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

By: Karen Hao

Narrated by: Karen Hao

A New York Times Notable Book • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award • An Instant New York Times Bestseller • Named a Best Book of the Year by Smithsonian, Scientific American, and Elle

“A bestselling page-turner that has made waves not just in Silicon Valley but around the world . . . With Empire of AI, Hao is fundamentally shaping many people’s perceptions and understanding of the company at the center of the AI revolution.” —TIME Magazine, “TIME100 AI 2025”

“Excellent and deeply reported.” —Tim Wu, The New York Times

“Startling and intensely researched . . . an essential account of how OpenAI and ChatGPT came to be and the catastrophic places they will likely take us.” —Vulture

From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman's OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy

When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?

Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?

Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.

Necessary.

Karen Hao has real access to insiders in an industry that makes lofty claims that are under scrutinized, despite its impact on our material and social world.

Phenomena

A great under the hood look at AI and the most powerful players in the delusional race to superiority

It's not that difficult to see the greed behind the promise.

Good insight, occasionally too much detail. maybe the detail has helped for future understanding, but it could get a bit dense.

Answers so many questions

This book gave more answers to the many questions left unanswered after Sam’s random firing and reinstatement, Annie’s accusations of Sam’s abuse, the split and formation of Anthropic, Ilya’s departure etc.

Can tell it was well researched and Karen Hao has been able to form good relations with people involved with the matter to reveal insider perspectives.

Very valuable counter perspective to OpenAI marketing, helped me see how we can develop AI for broadly useful and non-exploitative uses with less compute and resources

Must read

Very in depth global expose necessary for any person witnessing how AI is changing the world through colonization and empire building