A New York Times Notable Book • An Instant New York Times Bestseller “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 “Hao’s reporting inside OpenAI is exceptional and she’s
persuasive in her argument that the public should focus less on A.I.’s putative ‘sentience’ and
more on its implications for labor and the environment.” —Benjamin Wallace-Wells New Yorker
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.
