The Empire Behind the AI Chat Interface

When journalist Karen Hao walked into a studio to record this episode, she spotted host Mishal Husain's handwritten mind map and read it upside down without hesitation. That moment of quick, nonlinear thinking—seeing connections others miss—has defined Hao's career. A former MIT Technology Review and Wall Street Journal reporter, she spent years embedded inside OpenAI, tracking the rise of companies she now calls "empires." Her new book, Empire of AI, argues that the biggest AI firms have consolidated more economic and political power than many nation-states, and that the public has been sold a false choice about how this technology must be built.

What "Empire" Actually Means

Hao is careful to distinguish her metaphor from historical empires that used overt violence and brutality. Instead, she points to a structural pattern: these companies seize and extract precious resources to feed a single vision of artificial intelligence. The resources include the data of individuals, the intellectual property of artists and writers, and an extraordinary amount of human labor.