A beat reporter follows the wires and the water traces, not the hype. In Wired interviews, Karen Hao argues at this time’s AI growth doesn’t seem like impartial innovation—it seems to be like an empire, extracting sources from Latin America whereas promoting salvation from Silicon Valley.
The Empire You Can See from the Ground
Karen Hao’s Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI doesn’t start in a keynote corridor. It begins in locations the place servers and slogans arrive as climate: Nairobi, labeling hubs the place trauma is sanitized for pennies; the Atacama, the place brine evaporates into white scars; suburban Santiago, the place new information campuses need electrical energy, tax breaks, and a protracted drink from a parched aquifer. “For me, it came through interviews with the communities most affected by AI’s supply chain,” Hao advised Wired. “They pointed out that what’s happening now is an extension of their history. In Kenya, they spoke of a new form of slavery. In Chile, they spoke of extractivism. For them, it’s a new empire.”
Empire, she insists, isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a ledger of recurring strikes: seize sources underneath pliable guidelines; depress labor prices; management data; justify all of it with a civilizing mission. “The industry claims resources that aren’t theirs,” she advised Wired, describing an economic system that scrapes the web—every little thing from novels to lullabies—underneath banners of “public data” and “fair use,” even when authors object. It outsources the dirtiest work—content material filtering, artificial labeling, security R&D—to precarious staff within the Global South whereas promising an endgame—AGI—that might “outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” That, Hao argues, is a pincer: depress bargaining energy now, then automate wages later.
The empire additionally colonizes the lab. Compute, frameworks, and benchmarks migrate behind company partitions; publication and coverage comply with. “The science and research have been distorted by what serves corporate interests, not the public interest,” Hao advised Wired. And like every empire, the rhetoric divides the world into “good” and “bad” hegemons. One chapter traces how OpenAI framed an exterior empire—first Google, later China—to justify its dash. The ethical not often wobbles: bless the “good empire” with information, capital, and deference, and it’ll ship modernity—and possibly salvation. Resist, and invite destroy.
Power, Data, Water: Latin America’s Front Row Seat
If AI conjures photos of server racks and smooth campuses, Hao suggests flipping the view: stand by the mine gate, the substation, the reservoir. “The best way to ‘see’ these processes,” she advised Wired, “is to go where they are lit differently.” In northern Chile, lithium and copper go away by the ton to feed batteries, transmission traces, and the AI build-out; within the middle, information facilities increase with a missionary promise—jobs, modernization, overseas capital—whereas asking quietly for what they really want: baseline energy, secure coverage, and water.
In the Salar de Atacama, group leaders watch evaporation ponds churn underneath desert solar, listening to speeches concerning the future their land will bankroll: electrical automobiles overseas, intelligence infrastructures in every single place. Progress for whom? Hao asks. “They don’t see progress,” she advised Wired. “Their land is taken; their wealth is extracted without fair compensation. And the only jobs often available are for the very companies they view as oppressors.” Around Santiago, organizers ask a distinct query: who determined to web site server farms right here, and from which river will the chillers drink? The sample repeats throughout Hao’s reporting: nationwide governments court docket capital; multinationals arrive; native communities—whose air, payments, and water will take up the prices—are briefed final.
And but, Latin America is not any passive stage. It’s a provider and a critic, a laboratory and a conscience directly. “What’s striking,” Hao stated to Wired, “is how hard these communities fight—asserting agency and ownership, making life difficult for companies, and forcing an international conversation about extractivism.” In the Atacama and on Santiago’s periphery, indigenous councils, neighborhood coalitions, and environmental attorneys have turned environmental overview into political theater, demanding hydrological transparency and fairness clauses, not simply ribbon cuttings. The empire extracts; the area solutions; and the combat itself turns into a type of training, a public seminar on who pays for the longer term.
Faith, Friction, and the Business of AGI
Hao’s reporting tumbles by means of OpenAI’s interior climate—boardroom ruptures, a CEO’s fall and resurrection, cofounders spinning out to discovered rivals, the sluggish gravitational pull from “research lab” to client platform. She is skeptical of the founding delusion. “They still call themselves a nonprofit,” she advised Wired, “but they are one of Silicon Valley’s most capitalistic organizations.” The middle of gravity isn’t a cathedral of open science, she argues; it’s distribution and information. “More users, more market share, more data,” she stated, describing a method that wraps fashionable prophecy—AGI—in up to date enterprise—subscription merchandise, licensing, platform lock-in.
Sam Altman, in her telling, is a virtuoso of sentimental energy: “He accumulates power through persuasion, not coercion,” Hao advised Wired. The approach is cheerful omnivory—not often say no; make everybody the protagonist; blur favored associate and regulator right into a single room. It reads as generosity to some, manipulation to others. The hole between persona and follow—”good man” versus “growth at all costs”—helps clarify why he could possibly be ejected in a blaze and restored in a weekend.
The story extends past a single govt; it’s the vernacular of an business that baptizes its ambitions with a better goal. Hao opens the e-book with Altman’s line—”probably the most highly effective persons are those who create religions”—as a result of the AGI narrative capabilities that method. “He understood early the need to give people a higher purpose,” she advised Wired. “He harnessed the fervor around AGI as that purpose and fed it—externally and internally.” Mission disciplines employees; prophecy persuades policymakers; each anesthetize scrutiny.
The friction is just not incidental; it’s gas. Research versus product; security versus ship date; openness versus moat—these binaries are staged and restaged in public whereas contracts, partnerships, and cloud footprints quietly increase. Faith makes the dash legible. Capital makes it nonnegotiable.
EFE@Hannibal Hanschke
Company-State, State-Company: When Democracies Slip
Hao’s most unsettling analogy reaches backward: the British East India Company. A chartered agency that metastasized—industrial leverage into political sovereignty, tariffs into taxes, non-public armies right into a public empire—earlier than being folded into the crown. “I see the dynamic between OpenAI and the Trump administration as a contemporary echo,” she advised Wired. In her framing, Washington views hyper-scale AI corporations as devices to increase an American sphere; the corporations view Washington as an influence adaptor for their very own imperial attain. Each needs the opposite’s equipment; every imagines, ultimately, holding the change.
The gears are already clicking. OpenAI softened its ban on army work, clearing lanes to protection contracts. Hardware-software-cloud stacks—non-public infrastructures—are being exported through offers that seem like public utilities: the platform as polity, the API as regulation. “The idea,” Hao advised Wired, “is to use multinationals as vehicles to extend U.S. power, with the hope that one day these companies could be nationalized.” Whether that endgame is actual or rhetorical issues much less to her than the current tempo: state-company and company-state surging towards one another, sharing language—safety, inevitability, deterrence—whereas the general public sphere thins.
What frightens Hao most is what erodes in transit. “No one in this ecosystem seems primarily concerned with preserving democracy,” she advised Wired. “They are moving quickly to unravel democratic norms.” The inversion is nearly elegant in its cruelty: the identical publics whose phrases are harvested to coach fashions, whose rivers run decrease to chill servers, whose wages are pressured by effectivity crusades, are requested to applaud the miracle. It’s why Hao insists the AI beat is just not a math downside. It’s energy, cash, ideology. Decode the maths and miss the empire, and also you’ll miss the purpose.
Her prescription is old-school and alive. “AI used to be a science story,” she stated to Wired. “Then it changed drastically.” The instruments embody: following the cash, pulling FOIAs on data-center siting and water rights, interrogating claims and security circumstances, surfacing procurement trails, and calling the communities requested to host the longer term. “If you’re good at FOIA, there are rich records on local data-center projects,” she advised Wired. “If you understand politics, trace the lobbying that wins these companies more power. If you have access to internal sources, gather relevant documents. And if your expertise is health, education, labor—go see how AI is remaking those sectors, and for whom.”
The hope is pragmatic, not pious: a thousand small accountability initiatives blooming wherever the empire lands, giving communities in Latin America and past the details to barter, the leverage to withstand, the language to insist that progress be counted in additional than press releases. Empires will not be inevitable, Hao reminds us. They are organized—contracts, pipelines, memoranda, non-disclosures, utility hookups—and group might be answered in form.
In the meantime, the map enlarges. From the salt flats to the server halls, from the village council to the enterprise board, the empire is seen—when you trouble to look down as usually as you lookup. The code is the least secret factor within the story. The secrets and techniques are the permits, the pumps, the power-purchase agreements, and the promise that the longer term will arrive clear whereas another person’s water runs dry.
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And Latin America—provider and skeptic, host and historian—stands within the doorway, asking probably the most fundamental, most subversive query an empire hates to listen to: Progress for whom?