New Delhi, Dec. 13 -- When it came out in May 2025, Karen Hao's book Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination gave the world a new lens through which to look at the rise of Artificial Intelligence companies. In Hao's framing, which occupies a central portion of the book along with tracing the growth of US-based OpenAI, modern tech and AI companies resemble the extractive colonial empires of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Hao, a former application engineer who has been following the rise of AI since its widespread commercial deployment in the form of Large Language Models (LLMs) over the past few years, has reported for publications like MIT Technology Review, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic. She believes that we...