Karen Hao

Karen Hao is an American journalist who has covered artificial intelligence for MIT Technology Review (as senior AI editor), The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. In 2020 she was the first reporter to profile OpenAI from the inside — a story the company disliked enough to freeze her out — and she has spent the years since documenting the industry’s supply chain, from Kenyan data annotators to the water drawn by data centers.

Empire of AI

Her book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (May 2025) became a bestseller and the most influential critical account of the modern AI industry. Its central claim is that companies like OpenAI behave like empires of old: laying claim to resources that are not their own — scraped intellectual property, cheap contract labor, land, energy, and water — while justifying the extraction with a civilizing mission, the quasi-religious promise of artificial general intelligence. Hao told Democracy Now! in 2025 that communities from artists to Chilean water activists describe the same first encounter with that empire: a total loss of agency over their own future.

Hao is careful to note she is not anti-AI in the abstract — she points to smaller, task-specific systems as genuinely beneficial — but she argues the scale-at-all-costs paradigm championed by Sam Altman is neither scientifically necessary nor democratically chosen. Her prescription is resistance from below: communities protecting their data, land, water, and schools until the companies are forced to change their approach. Industry defenders counter that her colonial framing undervalues the consumer surplus and scientific progress the technology has already delivered.