Empire of AI

Hao, formerly of MIT Technology Review, spent years reporting inside OpenAI, and the book's real contribution is refusing the industry's preferred framing of AI as either inevitable revolution or overhyped bubble. Instead she treats OpenAI as an empire in the literal sense: a power structure that concentrates decision-making in a small circle while distributing the costs, low-wage content-moderation labor in Kenya, resource-hungry data centers, environmental strain, onto people far from Silicon Valley who have no say in the arrangement. That framing is the book's strength and also where critics have pushed back, since some of the labor-exploitation case studies read as chosen for dramatic effect rather than presented as clearly representative. It remains the most granular outsider account yet published of how OpenAI actually operates.