Empire of AI - Outside of a Dog

Hardcover, 496 pages

English language

Published July 14, 2025 by Penguin Publishing Group.

ISBN:: 978-0-593-65750-8

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 …

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.

4 editions

benwerd@bookwyrm.social reviewed Empire of AI by Karen Hao

The chronicle of AI, the modern tech industry, and the fools that run it.

5 stars

In Empire of AI, Karen Hao has built a compelling portrait of the internal workings OpenAI, and through it, a portrait of both the AI movement and the modern tech industry. I hope that everyone who has contemplated bringing AI into their businesses and workflows reads it: the tools and even the promise of the technology has been shaped by these specific people and their assumptions, values, and worldviews.

The title is apt. OpenAI’s approach is empire — this is an organization that seeks to centralize power rather than democratize it. It readily sits on a shelf alongside books like Careless People, but the themes here are sometimes reminiscent of Succession. It’s about power. The whole industry is about power. And Hao lays it out clearly and beautifully.

We’re left with a little sprig of hope in the epilogue. I agree with the premise here: there’s a version …

In Empire of AI, Karen Hao has built a compelling portrait of the internal workings OpenAI, and through it, a portrait of both the AI movement and the modern tech industry. I hope that everyone who has contemplated bringing AI into their businesses and workflows reads it: the tools and even the promise of the technology has been shaped by these specific people and their assumptions, values, and worldviews.

The title is apt. OpenAI’s approach is empire — this is an organization that seeks to centralize power rather than democratize it. It readily sits on a shelf alongside books like Careless People, but the themes here are sometimes reminiscent of Succession. It’s about power. The whole industry is about power. And Hao lays it out clearly and beautifully.

We’re left with a little sprig of hope in the epilogue. I agree with the premise here: there’s a version of these technologies that are tightly bound, built respectfully, and aim to do one thing well. That’s the future. This idea that there should be one tool that does everything well, built with many billions of dollars, the exploitation of the global majority, and with neurotic executives with egos the size of warships at the helm, is not long for this world. May it depart quickly and with as little further damage as possible in its wake.