Empire of AI
A review of

Empire of AI

Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

Karen Hao • Penguin Press • 2025
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AI at Any Cost 

by Patricia Sanders

As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in everyday life, the extraordinary power of the companies building it demands closer scrutiny. Journalist Karen Hao argues that OpenAI has become a new kind of empire — opaque, extractive, and dependent on the labor and resources of people far from Silicon Valley.

Journalist Karen Hao began reporting on OpenAI and its founder, Sam Altman, in 2020, in the pages of MIT Technology Review, before ChatGPT made them household names. Her first profile noted the disconnect between OpenAI’s stated ideals and the reality of the way it did business: ambitious, opaque, long on promises, ”economic freedom” for all, thanks to artificial general intelligence, according to then CTO Greg Brockman, and short on details of how it would get there. That story got Hao blacklisted at OpenAI: No one at the company would speak to her for three years.

Since then, Hao has continued reporting on OpenAI, and in 2025, she gathered her work into Empire of AI: more than 400 pages of dense reporting, supporting her overarching thesis that OpenAI has strayed so far from its altruistic founding purpose that it now amounts to a 21st-century version of an empire, extracting land, labor, and resources from people in the Global South to fuel its own ambitions.

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