Longlisted for the 2025 Financial Times & Schroders Business Book of the Year 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.
