What does Karen Hao mean when she calls AI companies 'empires of AI'?

Karen Hao uses empire as a metaphor for how large AI companies operate. She lists four parallels with historic empires: they claim resources that are not theirs, they exploit large amounts of labour, they monopolise knowledge about the technology, and they tell the public they are the good empire that must win before a bad one does.

• Resources, in Hao's account, include personal data, the work of artists and writers, and land for supercomputer facilities.
• Hao says the labs contract hundreds of thousands of workers worldwide, including in the US, and design tools to automate labour.
• The rival cast as the evil empire is usually China today, but in OpenAI's early days it was Google.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett (2026-10-23). Read the whole episode summary →

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