Empire of AI
Inside the reckless race for total domination
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd
Publishing:19th May '26
£14.99
This title is due to be published on 19th May, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£25.00(9780241678923)
Longlisted for the 2025 Financial Times & Schroders Business Book of the Year
Shortlisted for Foyles Non Fiction Book of the Year 2025
A New York Times Bestseller
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 OpenAI
When longtime AI expert and 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, 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 OpenAI and shows us the sinister impact that this industry is having on society.
A gripping new account of the battle for AI supremacy… tense and absorbing -- Emine Saner * Guardian *
A veteran AI reporter, Hao’s more detailed account of OpenAI’s progress... doesn't pull any punches -- Richard Waters * Financial Times *
Excellent and deeply reported -- Tim Wu * New York Times *
Hao’s reporting inside OpenAI is exceptional, and she’s persuasive in her argument that the public should focus less on A.I.’s putative ‘sentience’ and more on its implications for labor and the environment -- Benjamin Wallace-Wells * New Yorker *
Startling and intensely researched . . . an essential account of how OpenAI and ChatGPT came to be and the catastrophic places they will likely take us * Vulture *
Deeply researched, gripping * Economist *
Hao pulls no punches in describing the building of one of the biggest names in generative AI, focusing her account on the dysfunctional, combative leadership approach of co-founder Sam Altman. She details how his apocalyptic predictions and messianic rhetoric attracted devoted disciples to his cause -- Andrew Hill * Financial Times Best Book of 2025: Business *
A bestselling page-turner that has made waves not just in Silicon Valley but around the world . . . With Empire of AI, Hao is fundamentally shaping many people’s perceptions and understanding of the company at the center of the AI revolution * TIME Magazine, “TIME100 AI 2025” *
An epic exposé that pulls back the curtain on the egos and uneasy compromises behind the rise of OpenAI and ChatGPT. It's full of dark details, some of them bordering on absurd, that shows how much of the AI boom runs on secrecy and is driven by questionable ideologies. This book serves as a warning about the price we all pay when AI builders who dreamed of utopia got swept up in a race to build empires instead -- Parmy Olson, Bloomberg columnist and author of Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World
Our lives are about to be remade by artificial intelligence—or to be more accurate, by a few companies run by a few very self-confident people. If you ever wondered whether all of this is inevitable, whether to believe all the promises of tech luminaries, whether we could save a little bit of our democracy in the age of AI, then read this book! -- Daron Acemoglu, recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences
ISBN: 9781802064650
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 15mm
Weight: 200g
496 pages