Hao is an award-winning investigative journalist and author of Empire of AI: Dreams and nightmares in Sam Altman’s Open AI (2025), has established herself as a leading voice on AI accountability. Based on extensive reporting, which includes 250 interviews with Open AI insiders suggest the industry is functioning less as a scientific endeavor and more as a modern-day imperial expansion.
Key Findings:
- The Empire of AI analogy – Open AI and similar operations, now operate more like modern empires, amassing significant economic and political power through the dispossession of global resources. These empires exhibit imperial characteristics by extracting data en-masse, such as intellectual property and natural resources without fair compensation to the source communities. Colonial extraction, these massive data centers rely on cheap labor in the Global South for data annotation and moderation, often causing severe psychological trauma while the benefits accumulate in the Global North.
- Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as a Marketing Myth – Hao believes AGI is less of a scientific goal and more of a marketing construct designed to consolidate power and justify massive investment. There seems to be some alarming but strategic ambiguity relating to AGI given there is no clear cut definition of the term, therefore companies can claim progress toward a transformative goal to maintain high valuations and secure capital, even while the technology remains narrow and flawed. The pursuit of AI has been driven often by the notion of an AI God rather than sound science, according to her reporting.
- Gaslighting the controlling of narratives – Hao highlights the public are being gaslit by AI companies, which present the image of doing public good, while privately engaging in a reckless race for total domination. Manufactured crises particularly the narrative between the US /China and the potential existential risks associated with AI and the narrative often justifies removing safety constraints and accelerating deployment.
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