Carole Cadwalladr
Investigative Journalist
The journalist who exposed Cambridge Analytica now calls the AI ascendancy a “digital coup” by a Silicon Valley “broligarchy” — telling TED that ChatGPT was trained on her work and data without consent.
In her words
ChatGPT has been trained on my IP, my labour, my personal data. And I did not consent.
Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, you are not gods. You are men and you are careless.
It’s broligarchy. There is an alignment of interests that runs through Silicon Valley to what is now a coming autocracy.
Biography
Carole Cadwalladr (born 1969) is a British investigative journalist whose reporting for The Observer and The Guardian exposed the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 — revealing how tens of millions of Facebook profiles were harvested to target voters — work that made her a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the subject of the Netflix documentary The Great Hack. She spent years defending a ruinous libel suit brought by Brexit backer Arron Banks, widely condemned as a SLAPP.
The digital coup
Returning to the TED stage in April 2025 — six years after her viral talk confronting the “gods of Silicon Valley” over Brexit — Cadwalladr declared the sequel had arrived: “This is what a digital coup looks like.” She named the “broligarchy,” a class of tech executives fusing platform power with political power, and addressed Sam Altman directly over OpenAI training on her writing and data without permission.
The entire business model of Silicon Valley is surveillance. It harvests our data in order to sell us stuff.
For Cadwalladr, generative AI is Cambridge Analytica at planetary scale: the same non-consensual data extraction, now aimed at replacing the people it extracted from, and entangled with a drift toward autocracy. Her rallying cry from the talk — “data rights are human rights” — has become the banner of her Substack, How to Survive the Broligarchy, where she chronicles the tech-politics merger week by week.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/carole-cadwalladr