Empire of AI

Empire of AI argues that the modern AI boom is less a neutral march of innovation and more a political economy of power. OpenAI’s journey—from lofty nonprofit ideals to a commercialization-first frontier lab—illustrates how quickly missions bend under the demands of scale, competition, and capital.

At the center is a doctrine: bigger models, more compute, more data. That doctrine drives everything—massive partnerships, secrecy, rushed deployment, and a policy agenda that can entrench incumbents. The book insists that this “scale-first” worldview is not destiny. It is a choice that creates its own inevitability by forcing everyone into the same resource-intensive race.

The empire grows by extracting what it needs: unpaid cultural data, underpaid global labor, and scarce environmental resources. The public is sold a story about future abundance, while the present reality includes exploited workers, strained communities, and governance systems that collapse when tested.

Yet the book is not only critique. It offers a counter-vision: AI developed with consent, constrained by accountability, built with smaller and more purposeful systems, and governed by the communities most affected by its infrastructure and outcomes. In Hao’s framing, the question is not whether AI will shape the future. It is who gets to decide the shape—and who pays for it.

Karen Hao is a technology journalist known for long-running coverage of artificial intelligence and its social consequences. Her reporting focuses on accountability, labor conditions, environmental impacts, and the concentration of power inside major tech institutions. In Empire of AI, she draws on extensive research and hundreds of interviews to map the human conflicts, governance breakdowns, and global supply chains behind frontier AI development.

Hao’s style combines investigative detail with cultural analysis, aiming to make complex technical and political dynamics understandable without stripping them of their moral stakes. Her work is often described as accessible and deeply reported, and it has also attracted debate because it challenges the heroic narratives that commonly surround Silicon Valley and AI progress.