There Are No Girls on the Internet Sam Altman Isn’t Building a Company, He’s Building an Empire (with Karen Hao)
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Mar 31, 2026 
Karen Hao, investigative technology journalist and author of Empire of AI, unpacks OpenAI’s shift from nonprofit ideals to empire-building. She explores Sam Altman’s rhetoric, monetization pressures, AI’s threats to privacy, health and democracy, and why transparency, regulation, and scrutiny of AI supply chains matter.
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Employees Can't Agree What OpenAI Even Is
- Employees' perceptions of OpenAI vary by when they joined, with early hires seeing a nonprofit mission and later hires viewing a typical tech company.
- This temporal divide made it hard for staff to even agree whether OpenAI was a company.
Sam Altman's Strategic Squishy Language
- Karen characterized Sam Altman's language as intentionally vague and audience-tailored, using nonquantifiable phrases to avoid commitments.
- She traced this to a pattern where he says what he thinks each audience wants to hear, shifting over time.
Judge AI By How It Shifts Power
- Instead of asking if AI is good or bad, Karen recommends asking whether a technology fortifies or dismantles empires by shifting power.
- This framing, inspired by Rhea Kaluri, clarifies societal impacts and who gains control from a given AI.
