In her brilliant book, Empire of AI, Karen Hao chronicles the mania surrounding artificial intelligence and OpenAI. With a cast of scientists, scammers, and scoundrels, Empire of AI documents the hype campaign that caused the world to fall in love with a technology whose immediate harms are legion and benefits remain unproved. When litigation comes, this book may find a second life as Exhibit A for the plaintiffs>

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Karen Hao is an award-winning journalist covering the impacts of artificial intelligence on society. She writes for publications including The Atlantic and leads the Pulitzer Center's AI Spotlight Series. She was formerly a tech reporter for the Wall Street Journal and a senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review. She has received numerous accolades for her coverage, including an American National Magazine Award for Journalists Under 30. She received her B.S. in mechanical engineering from MIT.

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**A New York Times and Sunday Times Bestseller
****Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award 2025
****Longlisted for the 2025 Financial Times & Schroders Business Book of the Year
Shortlisted for Foyles Non Fiction Book of the Year 2025

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

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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.