Karen Hao on the Empire of AI, AGI evangelists, and the cost of belief

Karen Hao’s analysis, as presented in her book and discussed in a TechCrunch event, frames the AI industry—particularly OpenAI—as an emerging empire driven by the ideology of artificial general intelligence (AGI) that promises to “benefit all humanity.” Hao argues that OpenAI wields unprecedented economic and political power, reshaping geopolitics and daily life much like a colonial empire. This AGI-driven mission has justified rapid, large-scale expansion of AI development, often at the expense of safety, efficiency, and ethical considerations. The industry’s focus on speed and scale—primarily by leveraging vast data and supercomputing resources—has sidelined alternative approaches that might prioritize algorithmic innovation and sustainability but progress more slowly. Hao highlights that this relentless pursuit of AGI has led to enormous financial expenditures by major tech companies, with OpenAI alone projecting massive spending through 2029, and others like Meta and Google investing heavily in AI infrastructure. Despite these investments, the promised broad societal benefits