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Empire of AI

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Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
AuthorKaren Hao
Cover artistDaniel Lagin
LanguageEnglish
GenreBiography
PublisherPenguin Press (U.S.)
Publication date
May 20, 2025
Publication placeUnited States
Media typeE-book, print (hardback), and audiobook
Pages496 pp.
ISBN978-0593657508

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI is a book by Karen Hao released on May 20, 2025. It focuses on the history of OpenAI and its culture of secrecy and devotion to the promise of artificial general intelligence (AGI) while extracting vast amounts of resources and exploiting workers.

The book includes interviews with around 260 people, correspondence, Slack conversations, and relevant documents.[1][2] The title makes reference to colonial empires of the 1800s.[3]

Origins

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Hao visited OpenAI's offices and covered the company for the MIT Technology Review two years before ChatGPT was released in November 2022.[4][5] Her experience there and reporting on topics of AI and "AI colonialism" for seven years led her to develop the book's thesis and title, Empire of AI, and ultimately became published as a book.[3][4][6]

Overview

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Hao covers the history of OpenAI that is sourced from employee interviews and relevant documents. Additionally, Hao covers the departure of early investor Elon Musk, the reinstatement of Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman after being forced out by OpenAI's board,[4] and reports from Colombia, the Philippines, Venezuela, and Kenya,[7] where she interviews low-wage contract workers categorized the severity of graphic content used to train ChatGPT.[2] The book also covers OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever obsession with artificial general intelligence (AGI) by summer 2023, while also becoming concerned about the way OpenAI was handling the technology it was developing.[8]

Contents

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  • Prologue: A Run for the Throne
  • Part I
  1. Divine Right
  2. A Civilizing Mission
  3. Nerve Center
  4. Dreams of Modernity
  5. Scale of Ambition
  • Part II
  1. Ascension
  2. Science in Captivity
  3. Dawn of Commerce
  4. Disaster Capitalism
  • Part III
  1. Gods and Demons
  2. Apex
  3. Plundered Earth
  4. The Two Prophets
  5. Deliverance
  • Part IV
  1. The Gambit
  2. Cloak-and-Dagger
  3. Reckoning
  4. A Formula for Empire
  • Epilogue: How the Empire Falls

Reception

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This book is one of two written about OpenAI that were released around the same time, the other being Keach Hagey's The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future. Both Hao and Hagey rely on similar sources to write their respective books.[9] Hao's book is noted to be "broader and more critical of the two" and "darker",[9] and "dispels any doubt that OpenAI’s belief in ushering in AGI to benefit all of humanity had messianic undertones".[4] Some have compared Hao's book to historian William Dalrymple's The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company, which recounts the rise of another corporate empire, The East India Company.[4]

OpenAI declined to cooperate with Hao on her book[3] and CEO Sam Altman has publicly criticised Hao's book on social media.[4]

Awards

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Hao received the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and the 2026 New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism for the book.[10][11]

Factual errors and retraction

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In November 2025, after fact-checking by Andy Masley and others, Karen Hao stated on her X account that the published version of the book mistakenly overestimates the water usage of a datacenter in Chile by a factor of 1,000x due to a unit conversion error. The discovery of this error was covered in media outlets such as Wired.[12]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Hao, Karen. "ChatGPT succeeded beyond OpenAI's wildest dreams. Then came the chaos". Business Insider. Retrieved May 21, 2025.
  2. ^ a b Edwards, Samantha (May 23, 2025). "Tech journalist Karen Hao takes aim at Sam Altman's OpenAI 'empire'". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved April 26, 2026.
  3. ^ a b c Inskeep, Steve (May 20, 2025). "Journalist Karen Hao discusses her book 'Empire of AI'". NPR. Retrieved May 21, 2025.
  4. ^ a b c d e f Mauran, Cecily (May 19, 2025). "'Empire of AI' author on OpenAI's cult of AGI and why Sam Altman tried to discredit her book". Mashable. Retrieved May 21, 2025.
  5. ^ Hao, Karen (May 19, 2025). "Inside the story that enraged OpenAI". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved April 26, 2026.
  6. ^ "OpenAI: The power and the pride". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved July 1, 2025.
  7. ^ Kim, Michelle (May 19, 2025). "Why AI advancement doesn't have to come at the expense of marginalized workers". Rest of World. Retrieved April 26, 2026.
  8. ^ Al-Sibai, Noor (May 22, 2025). "OpenAI's Top Scientist Wanted to "Build a Bunker Before We Release AGI"". Futurism. Retrieved April 26, 2026.
  9. ^ a b Wu, Tim (May 19, 2025). "Hey ChatGPT, Which One of These Is the Real Sam Altman?". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved May 21, 2025.
  10. ^ Alter, Alexandra (March 27, 2026). "Han Kang Among National Book Critics Circle Award Winners". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved March 27, 2026.
  11. ^ "NYPL's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism". www.nypl.org. The New York Public Library. Retrieved April 16, 2026.
  12. ^ Taft, Molly. "You're Thinking About AI and Water All Wrong". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved January 2, 2026.
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