Empire of AI : Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination -Financial Times Book of 2025

Description

Listed for the 2025 Financial Times Book of the Year.

Shortlisted for Foyles Non Fiction Book of the Year 2025

In exhilarating prose and with unparalleled access to those closest to Sam Altman, Hao recounts the meteoric rise of Open AI and shows us the sinister impact that this industry is having on society.

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 Open AI.

When long-time AI expert and journalist Karen Hao first began covering Open AI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a non-profit 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 Open AI and shows us the sinister impact that this industry is having on society.

Hardback (2025) still available.