Empire of AI (2025)

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. The title makes reference to colonial empires of the 1800s.

Origins

Hao visited OpenAI's offices and covered the company for the MIT Technology Review two years before ChatGPT was released in November 2022. 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.

Overview

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, and reports from Colombia, the Philippines, Venezuela, and Kenya, where she interviews low-wage contract workers that categorized the severity of graphic content used to train ChatGPT. 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.

Contents

Prologue: A Run for the Throne

Part I

Divine Right

A Civilizing Mission

Nerve Center

Dreams of Modernity

Scale of Ambition

Part II

Ascension

Science in Captivity

Dawn of Commerce

Disaster Capitalism

Part III

Gods and Demons

Apex

Plundered Earth

The Two Prophets

Deliverance

Part IV

The Gambit

Cloak-and-Dagger

Reckoning

A Formula for Empire

Epilogue: How the Empire Falls

Reception

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. Hao's book is noted to be "broader and more critical of the two" and "darker", and "dispels any doubt that OpenAI’s belief in ushering in AGI to benefit all of humanity had messianic undertones". 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.

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

Awards

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.

Criticism

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.