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Empire of AI

Inside the reckless race for total domination

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Empire of AI

By: Karen Hao
Narrated by: Karen Hao
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

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.

© Karen Hao 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 Best of 2025 Business Ethics Computer Science Environment History & Culture Machine Theory & Artificial Intelligence Science Technology & Society Workplace & Organisational Behavior

Critic reviews

A gripping new account of the battle for AI supremacy… tense and absorbing (Emine Saner)
A veteran AI reporter, Hao’s more detailed account of OpenAI’s progress... doesn't pull any punches (Richard Waters)
Excellent and deeply reported (Tim Wu)
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)
Startling and intensely researched . . . an essential account of how OpenAI and ChatGPT came to be and the catastrophic places they will likely take us
Deeply researched, gripping
Hao pulls no punches in describing the building of one of the biggest names in generative AI, focusing her account on the dysfunctional, combative leadership approach of co-founder Sam Altman. She details how his apocalyptic predictions and messianic rhetoric attracted devoted disciples to his cause (Andrew Hill)
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
An epic exposé that pulls back the curtain on the egos and uneasy compromises behind the rise of OpenAI and ChatGPT. It's full of dark details, some of them bordering on absurd, that shows how much of the AI boom runs on secrecy and is driven by questionable ideologies. This book serves as a warning about the price we all pay when AI builders who dreamed of utopia got swept up in a race to build empires instead (Parmy Olson, Bloomberg columnist and author of Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World )
Our lives are about to be remade by artificial intelligence—or to be more accurate, by a few companies run by a few very self-confident people. If you ever wondered whether all of this is inevitable, whether to believe all the promises of tech luminaries, whether we could save a little bit of our democracy in the age of AI, then read this book! (Daron Acemoglu, recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences)
All stars
Most relevant
I enjoyed this and thought very thorough, thoughtful and challenging- it really made mw think about the AI companies and their dangers.

Insight, research, fearlessnes

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Fantastic listen. Exquisite storytelling. Mind-blowing insights! One of the best books I have listened to in the last 15 years

FANTASTIC!!!

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Informative and a page turner.
I think, those who have read this book Will agree that there is something that rings true about the moral lesson.
Highly recommended

Very impress

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You cannot fault how meticulous this has been researched yet I can’t help feel it missed a trick in what could have been a great book.
If you want to know about the players, the egos and the corporate politics and competition in AI this is for you. There did though seem to be unnecessary names checks almost as if they would at least buy the book.
What was missing was more about the capability and challenges of getting it right. “Training” and “safety and risks” were mentioned but in a catch all way and not deep diving into what is involved, and how these have changed over time.
There are good sections on the environmental impact and exploitation of workers in poorer countries, but ultimately this is more a business book than a technology book.

Not the book I thought it would be

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Hao’s book is an impressive work of investigative journalism focusing more on the current/near term ethical issues, risks and dangers of AI, particularly focusing on OpenAI (needless to say Altman does not come across well) and its pursuit of AGI at all costs. Definitely worth your time if you are interested in AI and its implications for the world. I was particularly impressed by her focus on its impact environmentally and on marginalized or low socioeconomic communities.

Great of current/near term risks

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