'We need 100 Earths to sustain generative Al'

Karen Hao, author of ‘Empire of AI’, explains how AI and tech companies are no less than extractive colonial empires

- Shrabonti Bagchi [e-mail]

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 OpenAl, 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 need to start using a new language to bring perspective to the magnitude of the economic and political power held by technology companies like Openal.

In this conversation on the sidelines of the Bangalore Literature Festival last weekend, Hao spoke to Lounge about how she arrived at this framing and what the consequences of the unchecked rise of AI companies could mean for the world. Edited excerpts from the interview:

It was actually based on scholarship that I started discovering in 2019. There were two pieces of work that were particularly influential: One called Decolonial AI, a 2020 research paper that came out of (Google's) DeepMind, and the other a book called The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, published in 2019. Both works were talking about the parallels between the AI industry—and the tech industry at large—and colonial empires. That was when I first started thinking about and reporting on AI from that perspective. When ChatGPT came out in the middle of me putting together a book proposal, it clicked that this story needed to be told through the story of OpenAL, which I had been following for some years.