Longlisted for the 2025 Financial Times & Schroders Business Book of the Year Finalist for the
National Book Critics Circle Award 2025 A Financial Times Book of the Year 2025 Shortlisted
for Foyles Non Fiction Book of the Year 2025 A New York Times Bestseller An eye-opening
account of the tech arms race shaping out planet from an award-winning journalist and AI
insider to the world of Sam Altman and OpenAI When longtime AI expert and 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 it was meant its leader Sam Altman told
us to act as a check against more purely market forces. But the core truth of this massively
disruptive sector is that it requires an unprecedented amount of proprietary resources: the
'compute' power of scarce high-end chips the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at
scale the humans on the ground 'cleaning it up' for sweatshop wages throughout the Global
South and a truly alarming spike in the need for energy and water underlying everything. We
have entered a new ominous age of empire with OpenAI setting a breakneck pace as a small
group of the most valuable companies in human history try to chase it down. In exhilarating
prose and with unparalleled access to those closest to Sam Altman Hao recounts the meteoric
rise of OpenAI and shows us the sinister impact that this industry is having on society.
