Jefferson On Race: A Reader
by Thomas Jefferson
Edited by Annette Gordon-Reed
Princeton University Press, 2026
[Publication date: March 31, 2026]
by Thomas Jefferson
Edited by Annette Gordon-Reed
Princeton University Press, 2026
[Publication date: March 31, 2026]
From the New York Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello comes a groundbreaking collection of Thomas Jefferson's writings on race.
Among America's Founding Fathers, none was more deeply, personally, or controversially entangled with race and slavery than Thomas Jefferson. The man whose Declaration of Independence proclaimed that "all men are created equal" enslaved more than 600 people of African descent even as he acknowledged the injustice of slavery, saw himself as its opponent, and condemned it in his writings. How is this possible? In Jefferson on Race, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed gathers Jefferson's most revealing writings about African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, enabling listeners as never before to directly explore his complex and contradictory thoughts, feelings, and decisions on these subjects--the most hotly debated aspect of his legacy.
These selections come from Jefferson's public and private writings, letters, and plantation records, as well as accounts by contemporaries, including his son Madison Hemings and three other people formerly enslaved at Monticello. The book documents Jefferson's ideas about--and self-image in relation to--African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, as well as his conduct, including interactions with individual Black and Native people. The writings show how Jefferson responded to living in a multiracial slave society while professing progressive ideals, and how his views on race and slavery were shaped by his experiences with enslaved Black people.
Jefferson on Race is essential listening for anyone seeking to understand Jefferson's conflicted attitudes--and the impact of race and slavery on American history.
REVIEWS:
Among America's Founding Fathers, none was more deeply, personally, or controversially entangled with race and slavery than Thomas Jefferson. The man whose Declaration of Independence proclaimed that "all men are created equal" enslaved more than 600 people of African descent even as he acknowledged the injustice of slavery, saw himself as its opponent, and condemned it in his writings. How is this possible? In Jefferson on Race, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed gathers Jefferson's most revealing writings about African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, enabling listeners as never before to directly explore his complex and contradictory thoughts, feelings, and decisions on these subjects--the most hotly debated aspect of his legacy.
These selections come from Jefferson's public and private writings, letters, and plantation records, as well as accounts by contemporaries, including his son Madison Hemings and three other people formerly enslaved at Monticello. The book documents Jefferson's ideas about--and self-image in relation to--African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, as well as his conduct, including interactions with individual Black and Native people. The writings show how Jefferson responded to living in a multiracial slave society while professing progressive ideals, and how his views on race and slavery were shaped by his experiences with enslaved Black people.
Jefferson on Race is essential listening for anyone seeking to understand Jefferson's conflicted attitudes--and the impact of race and slavery on American history.
REVIEWS:
“There is no one on earth better equipped to take on the formidable subject of Thomas Jefferson and race than Annette Gordon-Reed. Wise, fearless, and brilliant, she has given us a vital collection of documents that repay our careful attention. Gordon-Reed is indispensable, and so is this book.”—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
“Annette Gordon-Reed is the world’s preeminent Jefferson scholar, and in this fascinating collection she has achieved something many of us have long reached for, in vain: a single volume gathering Jefferson’s wide-ranging writings on race. Accessible, well-curated, and absorbing to read, Jefferson on Race lifts the veil on the many-angled person behind the author of the Declaration of Independence.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University
“An extraordinary collection of documents that illuminates Thomas Jefferson’s complicated attitudes toward slavery and race (including Indigenous peoples). It has been put together and introduced by Annette Gordon-Reed, the scholar who knows the most about Jefferson and slavery. In her discussion of the documents, Gordon-Reed is thoroughly honest and fair-minded. Indeed, she and her superb scholarship are helping us save our dream of an integrated nation.”—Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), one of America’s most important Founding Fathers, was the third president of the United States, the founder of the University of Virginia, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, and the author of Notes on the State of Virginia.
ABOUT THE EDITOR:
Annette Gordon-Reed is a New York Times–bestselling historian and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. Her books include The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, and (with Peter S. Onuf) Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.
by Rhae Lynn Barnes
Liveright, 2026
[Publication date: March 24, 2026]
"This book, I suspect, will detonate over certain corners in America.... Darkology is a major and thrilling work of American history." ―Dwight Garner, New York Times Book Review
As Heard on NPR's Fresh Air: "Quite enlightening."
As Heard on NPR's Fresh Air: "Quite enlightening."
―Terry Gross
"Tremendous. Barnes has corralled the chaos, contradiction, and surprise of American social reality; evaded mythology; and made the ‘unwritten’ legible. [A] painfully necessary autopsy of the nation’s soul."
―Walton Muyumba, Boston Globe
Named one of the Best Books of the Month by the New York Times, TIME, and Kirkus Reviews
A groundbreaking history, decades in the making, that chronicles how blackface dominated American society culturally, financially, and racially for nearly two centuries.
Never before has the disturbing story of blackface and its piercing reflection of American society been so comprehensively told. With Darkology, Princeton historian Rhae Lynn Barnes meticulously unravels the complex, subterranean, and all-too-often expunged history of “Darkology”―the insidious study, commodification, and dehumanization of Black life, through which performers caricatured the enslaved and formerly enslaved for their supposed subservience and happy demeanor.
Given the extraordinary research reflected in Darkology, it’s not surprising that Barnes spent twenty years tracking down “fading photographs, old movies, bureaucratic detritus, moldy scripts, and living witnesses, assembling an impressive archive that allowed her to demonstrate the astonishingly broad reach of blackface minstrelsy” (Laurel Thatcher Ulrich). Painstakingly piecing together these scattered shards of evidence, Barnes reveals the shocking extent to which blackface took center stage in every era of American history.
This was not a fringe activity. By 1830, as political resistance to slavery grew, blackface exploded from a niche performance into a venomous national export. Within a decade, hardly a theater in the country didn’t put on minstrel shows. Following the Civil War, this grotesque entertainment soared, seeping from professional theaters into everyday amateur shows, print, and advertisements. It was everywhere: Elks Clubs, religious institutions, battlefields, universities, and schools. It wasn’t just in the Jim Crow era; it defined it. The very name “Jim Crow” derives from minstrelsy’s founding character.
Darkology dismantles the myth that blackface was a fleeting, post–Civil War phenomenon. Even in eras known for liberal progressivism, it flourished. Barnes unearths the startling fact that four-term president Franklin D. Roosevelt was a devotee who died hours before a blackface show he had commissioned at Warm Springs. It permeated U.S. military bases and was even used in World War II Japanese American concentration camps and German POW camps as a bizarre tool of “Americanization.”
After WWII, the tide began to turn as Black veterans and mothers in places like suburban California protested the practice in schools. Still, blackface performances proved resilient, surfacing as late as 1969 at the University of Vermont. Even as the Civil Rights movement fought for equality, blackface remained present in American politics and white supremacist organizing through the Nixon and Ford administrations, its legacy still percolating in variable forms today.
By tracing minstrelsy’s evolution through oral histories, material culture, and a wide range of multimedia sources, Barnes’s “masterpiece” (David Blight) forces us to reckon with the myriad ways the American Dream wore blackface. Recasting this American story with “vivid and engaging storytelling” (Howard French), Darkology is a landmark work that peers beneath the boulders deliberately obscuring our past―illuminating a path toward a more just and equal society in America’s future. 72 illustrations
REVIEWS:
"Barnes, who teaches at Princeton, has spent two decades rummaging in closets, basements, schools, churches, attics and estate sales ― under the eaves of the American psyche.... [A] meticulous, cleareyed and pulverizing new volume.... [Barnes] has scraped together everything that’s known and plastered new receipt after new receipt after new receipt to the walls of the historical record.... Barnes is an American aquarium drinker, with a nose for the dregs at the bottom of the tank. You can open up Darkology almost anywhere and find the squirming details.... It opens with a 33-page introduction that is so vivid and shot through with annihilating detail that you wonder if she has anywhere left to go. She does. This book, I suspect, will detonate over certain corners in America.... Darkology is a major and thrilling work of American history. It deals out uncomfortable truth after uncomfortable truth."
― Dwight Garner, New York Times Book Review
"Tremendous.... Barnes has corralled the chaos, contradiction, and surprise of American social reality; evaded mythology; and made... the ‘unwritten’ legible.... [A] painfully necessary autopsy of the nation’s soul."
― Walton Muyumba, Boston Globe
"A decade in the making, Princeton scholar Rhae Lynn Barnes’ rich if disquieting history of blackface rips off the masks from entertainers and politicians alike. She wraps meticulous research around a mainstreamed (until recently) form of white supremacy, rooted in minstrel shows. From The Birth of a Nation to The Jazz Singer, from an empire at war to protests at home, from Japanese incarceration camps to Watergate, she exposes racial anxiety at the heart of the American Experiment and how blackface sanitized prejudices for white audiences."
― Hamilton Cain, TIME, “10 New Books You Should Read in March”
"This cultural history may begin by focusing on blackface performance on stage and screen, but it broadens out to consider how minstrelsy came to be accepted as lighthearted entertainment on college campuses and within fraternal organizations well into the 20th century."
― New York Times Book Review, “27 Books Coming in March”
"Essential . . . [Barnes’] immensely readable work covers more than a hundred years of white America’s embrace of this sordid form of entertainment . . . An important and necessarily uncomfortable work on a disturbing legacy."
― Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"This groundbreaking history of blackface in the United States uncovers not only the formation of the racist art form but its hold on culture and politics . . . meticulously researched . . . a landmark work."
― Library Journal, starred review
"The scope and tenacity of Barnes’ research is impressive, as she reveals blackface as a cultural institution supported by white officials at every level of government . . . Darkology tells the story of a genre that pervaded American culture and politics across decades, taking care along the way to highlight the voices of those who resisted."
― Booklist
"In Darkology, Rhae Lynn Barnes shines an unsparing spotlight on blackface, a wildly popular staple of stage and screen that from its inception in the mid-1800s was never mere entertainment. Relying on pernicious stereotypes that served to undermine the humanity of African Americans, blackface on its surface was meant for laughs, but in truth was a tool deployed at all levels of society, from local school boards all the way up to the federal government, that promoted and perpetuated anti-Black racism as the nation’s status quo. Through fastidious research and the painstaking pursuit of archives and documents hidden from historians for decades, Barnes has written nothing short of an exposé of the structural racism that undergirds the very foundations on which America is built. In ways both insidious and institutionalized, blackface has always informed what it means to be American."
― Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor; Director, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research
"Rhae Lynn Barnes has written a surprising and exhaustive masterpiece about amateur blackface minstrelsy. Barnes dares to demonstrate that laughing at fictional concoctions of Black people has been as American as baseball. Convincingly, she shows that this most popular form of entertainment is central to grasping American culture from Reconstruction all the way to our own time. It never died, Barnes argues, in a vast print culture, in cross-racial performance, in commercialism, and especially with influence in the nation’s closets and family scrapbooks. A ‘contagion,’ like a ‘hidden river’ bursting forth, Americans have always loved and hated blackface. The secrets are out! Readers will be stunned at how much Jim Crow and its endless tenacles, manifested in blackface, have both strangled and released the American imagination. This gigantic spiderweb has captured more of our cultural time and power than most Americans will ever want to believe. With astonishing research, the book reveals as it informs about a tragedy at the heart of who we are."
― David W. Blight, Yale University, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass
"Rhae Lynn Barnes brilliantly recounts the long and twisted saga of blackface theater in America with remarkable excellence. This is a master class on the degradations of racist stereotyping of African Americas as happy slaves, mammies, half-wits, and raggedy Jim Crow musical clowns. With luminous prose and riveting attention to detail, Barnes investigates what the minstrel tradition means in terms of white supremacy writ large, with devastating results. Who knew that presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Gerald Ford were diehard fans of blackface entertainment? A stunning achievement."
― Douglas Brinkley, Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of history at Rice University, author of Rosa Parks
"Rhae Lynn Barnes’s Darkology is not only exemplary scholarship for its sharp original material, precision, and care, its vivid and engaging storytelling recreates a shameless world where the most popular forms of American entertainment treated the demeaning of Black people as the most natural of things."
― Howard French, author of Born in Blackness and The Second Emancipation
"It is probably hard for present day Americans to believe how pervasive ‘blackface’ was during the 19th through the 20th centuries. Used as ‘entertainment’ in virtually all types of institutions in the country, it telegraphed the contempt in which Black people were held. Meticulously researched and fluidly written, Darkology is a necessary exploration of this revealing and disturbing aspect of American history."
― Annette Gordon-Reed, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Hemingses of Monticello
"Reading Rhae Lynn Barnes’s Darkology is like taking a tour of the political unconscious of racial capitalism and empire in the United States―violent, desirous, and just plain weird―from slavery all the way down to the present day."
― Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America
"Toiling for years in archives across the United States, Rhae Lynn Barnes has uncovered an often deliberately buried body of evidence: an indisputable record of the ubiquity of blackface minstrelsy across two centuries of American history. Darkology is the definitive, searing account of that unsettling past."
― Jill Lepore, author of These Truths and We the People
"There are many things to praise about this lively and important book. But underlying its many virtues is the author's twenty-year quest to transform a personal interest into a documented history. Darkology demonstrates the truth of the old adage: no source, no history. Undaunted by the perceived unimportance of her topic and by archival efforts to protect the innocent or the guilty, Rhae Lynn Barnes tracked down fading photographs, old movies, bureaucratic detritus, moldy scripts, and living witnesses, assembling an impressive archive that allowed her to demonstrate the astonishingly broad reach of blackface minstrelsy in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America."―Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Midwife’s Tale
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rhae Lynn Barnes is an assistant professor of American cultural history at Princeton University and the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.
Rhae Lynn Barnes is an assistant professor of American cultural history at Princeton University and the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.
A CONVERSATION WITH RHAE LYNN BARNES, AUTHOR OF "DARKOLOGY"
What does "Darkology," mean? Why does it matter that this was both an amateur and professional blackface minstrel show obsession? "Darkology" was a term used by publishing houses and celebrities like Bing Crosby to describe the "study" and mimicry of Black life and culture through blackface instructional how-to books and guides that were used by school children, churches, fraternal orders, the Boy Scouts. While historians often say minstrelsy died on the professional theatrical stage by 1900, they missed this "hidden river" flowing through popular culture. Millions of everyday Americans—teachers, parents, police officers, and judges—purchased these guides and cast themselves as "masters of Darkology." By focusing on amateurs, we see that this wasn't just a "sideshow;" it was at the dark, ever-present center of modern American life. Americans were not just spectators to blackface like they were in antebellum America. They painted their faces in ways that they thought were racially funny. They talked in ways they thought were funny because of their race. They believed these books that argued slavery was just dancing in cottonfields and playing banjo, and that has cataclysmic repercussions that we still face today, like when our current President says slavery wasn’t that bad, and believes it. This is a story of where that logic came from.
One of the most surprising parts of your research is the "federalization" of blackface. How did the U.S. government get involved in the business of blackface minstrelsy? There was a federal blackface bailout. During the Great Depression, the WPA’s National Service Bureau became the nation’s largest publisher and distributor of blackface scripts. The federal government mass-produced these "ready-to-perform" minstrel kits to rescue the struggling theater industry and publishing industries, and effectively used taxpayer money to subsidize racial caricature for the millions. It created a huge bureaucratic division in Washington DC dedicated to sifting through minstrel scripts, repackaging them, and distributing them to the masses. This continued into WWII, where the government encouraged blackface in troop entertainment. We know every soldier was given cigarettes when they enlisted. They were also given a songbook that fit into the breast pocket of their uniform, including classic blackface Americana songs like “Dixie,” and “O! Susannah”. It was a way to culturally unify 16 million Americans, suddenly scattered around the world, who needed to be reminded of the home front. Of course, the military was segregated, so this material was also given to Black soldiers. They resisted and began developing arguments that would be critical in the Civil Rights Movement.
You argue that "blackface capitalism" was the substructure of Jim Crow America. How did offensive joke books become infrastructure? If you look at the welcome signs of thousands of American towns, the emblems of clubs like the Elks, the Rotary, and the Lions didn't just signal fellowship; for decades, they were the engines of blackface minstrelsy. These clubs mass-produced ready-made blackface plays to fundraise for their ranks, using the profits to build the cathedrals of white supremacy: the local lodges, hospitals, and segregated parks that formed the physical infrastructure of Jim Crow. Blackface wasn't just "silly" entertainment; it was a lucrative enterprise that granted white families economic advantages and political power while reinforcing the message that Black Americans were cultural outsiders.
In a book that uncovers so much "darkness," where do you find the "roadmap for the light"? The light comes from the ordinary giants who refused to remain silent. Heroes like Betty Reid Soskin, a young mother who saw her son's schoolteachers perform a blackface show at Parkmead Elementary in the 1950s and realized the toll integration was taking on her child. She, alongside the NAACP and a courageous coalition of mothers, launched the anti-minstrel movements that finally uprooted these traditions. Blackface didn't just fade away; it was dismantled by people who looked at the evidence and chose justice. This history proves that we have the power to decide what comes next in the United States of America. We can topple centuries-long traditions. We can work together towards that more perfect Union. What we do, the history we remember, and what we memorialize matter.
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
by Karen Hao
Penguin Press, 2026
[Publication date: May 20, 2025]
by Karen Hao
Penguin Press, 2026
[Publication date: May 20, 2025]
A New York Times Notable Book • Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction • A New York Times Bestseller • Named a Best Book of the Year by Smithsonian, Scientific American, and Elle • Winner of the Porchlight Business Book Award
“A bestselling page-turner that has made waves not just in Silicon Valley but around the world . . . With Empire of AI, Hao is fundamentally shaping many people’s perceptions and understanding of the company at the center of the AI revolution.” —TIME Magazine, “TIME100 AI 2025”
“Excellent and deeply reported.” —Tim Wu, The New York Times
“Startling and intensely researched . . . an essential account of how OpenAI and ChatGPT came to be and the catastrophic places they will likely take us.” —Vulture
From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman's OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy
When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?
Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.
“A bestselling page-turner that has made waves not just in Silicon Valley but around the world . . . With Empire of AI, Hao is fundamentally shaping many people’s perceptions and understanding of the company at the center of the AI revolution.” —TIME Magazine, “TIME100 AI 2025”
“Excellent and deeply reported.” —Tim Wu, The New York Times
“Startling and intensely researched . . . an essential account of how OpenAI and ChatGPT came to be and the catastrophic places they will likely take us.” —Vulture
From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman's OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy
When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?
Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.
REVIEWS:
“Easily one of the most gripping nonfiction books I’ve ever read, it keeps you hanging with cliff-hangers that envelop its dramatic characters, occasionally brave and often cowardly people hired and fired by artificial intelligence company OpenAI. One of the few journalists ever invited to interview OpenAI staff, Hao’s expertise flies off every page, and her dozens of pages of notes and citations back it up. She doesn’t hold back as she unveils the ivory towers and monied meetings driving AI, as well as the unrecognized workers around the globe sacrificing their mental health to build it safer.” —Scientific American
“A bestselling page-turner that has made waves not just in Silicon Valley but around the world . . . With Empire of AI, Hao is fundamentally shaping many people’s perceptions and understanding of the company at the center of the AI revolution.” —TIME Magazine, “TIME100 AI 2025”
“The strength of Karen Hao’s detailed analysis of America’s AI industry, Empire of AI, is that her relentlessly grounded approach refuses to play the game of the AI hype merchants. Hao makes a convincing case that it is wrong to focus on hypotheticals about the future of AI when its present incarnation is fraught with so many problems.” —Jacobin
“Startling and intensely researched . . . an essential account of how OpenAI and ChatGPT came to be and the catastrophic places they will likely take us.” —Vulture
“Excellent and deeply reported.” —Tim Wu, The New York Times
“Hao’s reporting inside OpenAI is exceptional, and she’s persuasive in her argument that the public should focus less on A.I.’s putative ‘sentience’ and more on its implications for labor and the environment.” —Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New Yorker
“Deeply researched, gripping.” —The Economist
“Empire of AI is a powerful work, bristling not only with great reporting but also with big ideas.” —Mat Honan, MIT Technology Review
“Timely and myth-busting . . . well reported . . . doesn’t pull any punches.” —Financial Times
"Easily one of the most gripping nonfiction books I’ve ever read, it keeps you hanging with cliff-hangers that envelop its dramatic characters, occasionally brave and often cowardly people hired and fired by artificial intelligence company OpenAI. One of the few journalists ever invited to interview OpenAI staff, Hao’s expertise flies off every page, and her dozens of pages of notes and citations back it up. She doesn’t hold back as she unveils the ivory towers and monied meetings driving AI, as well as the unrecognized workers around the globe sacrificing their mental health to build it safer." — Brianne Kane, Scientific American
“Well-reported . . . urgent.” —Kirkus
“Our lives are about to be remade by artificial intelligence—or to be more accurate, by a few companies run by a few very self-confident people. If you ever wondered whether all of this is inevitable, whether to believe all the promises of tech luminaries, whether we could save a little bit of our democracy in the age of AI, then read this book!” —Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor, MIT, and recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences
“With devastating revelations, deep insider research, and delightful page-turning delivery, Karen Hao shows us why she is one of the foremost tech journalists covering AI. From data centers in Chile to data workers in Kenya, Empire of AI reveals the hidden human and environmental costs behind AI products that have triggered a race for land, water, and cheap labor to cement power in the hands of a few. Empire of AI is the warning we need—just as more open and less energy-intensive alternatives reveal that a different AI future is possible and achievable.” —Dr. Joy Buolamwini, founder of Algorithmic Justice League and best-selling author of Unmasking AI
“In her brilliant book, Empire of AI, Karen Hao chronicles the mania surrounding artificial intelligence and OpenAI. With a cast of scientists, scammers, and scoundrels, Empire of AI documents the hype campaign that caused the world to fall in love with a technology whose immediate harms are legion and benefits remain unproved.” —Roger McNamee, New York Times-bestselling author of Zucked
"Karen Hao's Empire of AI is an epic exposé that pulls back the curtain on the egos and uneasy compromises behind the rise of OpenAI and ChatGPT. It's full of dark details, some of them bordering on absurd, that shows how much of the AI boom runs on secrecy and is driven by questionable ideologies. This book serves as a warning about the price we all pay when AI builders who dreamed of utopia got swept up in a race to build empires instead.” —Parmy Olson, Bloomberg columnist and author of Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World
“Empire of AI is a heroic work. Karen Hao braved many obstacles with gritty determination as she traveled the yellow brick road to the Oz of the storied corporation OpenAI to bring us this work of essential public education. Her courage was rewarded with truth. Altman, a cunning young man with outsized ambition and excellent ‘people skills,’ condemned the world to the digital violence of an approach to ‘artificial intelligence’ that can only exist by devouring the totality of the world's information and then the world itself. Mr. Altman was no wizard, and the seers of our digital future had little vision beyond their own baseless rhetoric and the billions of dollars from greedy or guileless investors. Hao is a gifted journalist and a deep thinker who reveals the historical significance and societal consequences of Silicon Valley’s AI spectacle, even as she meticulously documents a company and its leader hellbent on getting there first with no idea where they are going. If you think the digital future is safe in the hands of brilliant scientists, smart investors, and earnest political leaders, read this book and think again.” —Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emeritus, Harvard Business School
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Karen Hao is an award-winning journalist covering the impacts of artificial intelligence on society. She writes for publications including The Atlantic and leads the Pulitzer Center's AI Spotlight Series, a program training thousands of journalists around the world on how to cover AI. She was formerly a reporter for the Wall Street Journal covering American and Chinese tech companies and a senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review. Her work is regularly taught in universities and cited by governments. She has received numerous accolades for her coverage, including an American Humanist Media Award and American Society of Magazine Editors NEXT Award for Journalists Under 30. She received her bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from MIT.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Prologue
A Run for the Throne
On Friday, November 17, 2023, around noon Pacific time, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Silicon Valley's golden boy, avatar of the generative AI revolution, logged on to a Google Meet to see four of his five board members staring at him.
From his video square, board member Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's chief scientist, was brief: Altman was being fired. The announcement would go out momentarily.
Altman was in his room at a luxury hotel in Las Vegas to attend the city's first Formula One race in a generation, a star-studded affair with guests from Rihanna to David Beckham. The trip was a short reprieve in the middle of the punishing travel schedule he had maintained ever since the company released ChatGPT about a year earlier. For a moment, he was too stunned to speak. He looked away as he sought to regain his composure. As the conversation continued, he tried in his characteristic way to smooth things over.
"How can I help?" he asked.
The board told him to support the interim chief executive they had selected, Mira Murati, who had been serving as his chief technology officer. Altman, still confused and wondering whether this was a bad dream, acquiesced.
Minutes later, Sutskever sent another Google Meet link to Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president and a close ally to Altman who had been the only board member missing from the previous meeting. Sutskever told Brockman he would no longer be on the board but would retain his role at the company.
The public announcement went up soon thereafter. "Mr. Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI."
On the face of it, OpenAI had been at the height of its power. Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, it had become Silicon Valley’s most spectacular success story. ChatGPT was the fastest-growing consumer app in history. The startup’s valuation was on the kind of meteoric ascent that made investors salivate and top talent clamor to join the rocket-ship company. Just weeks before, it had been valued at up to $90 billion as part of a tender offer it was in the middle of finalizing that would allow employees to sell their shares to said eager investors. A few days before, it had held a highly anticipated and highly celebrated event to launch its most aggressive slate of products.
Altman was, as far as the public was concerned, the man who had made it all happen. He had spent the spring and summer touring the world, reaching a level of celebrity that was leading the media to compare him to Taylor Swift. He had wowed just about everyone with his unassuming small frame, bold declarations, and apparent sincerity.
Before Vegas, he had once again been globe-trotting, sitting on a panel at the APEC CEO Summit, delivering lines with his usual dazzling effect.
"Why are you devoting your life to this work?" Laurene Powell Jobs, founder and president of the Emerson Collective and Steve Jobs's widow, had asked him.
"I think this will be the most transformative and beneficial technology humanity has yet invented," he said. "Four times now in the history of OpenAI-the most recent time was just in the last couple of weeks-I have gotten to be in the room, when we sort of push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward, and getting to do that is, like, the professional honor of a lifetime."
Shocked employees learned about Altman’s firing just as everyone else did, the link to the public announcement zipping from one phone to the next across the company. It was the chasm between the news and Altman’s glowing reputation that startled them the most. The company was by now pushing eight hundred people. These days, employees had fewer opportunities to meet and interact with their CEO in person. But his charming demeanor on global stages was not unlike how he behaved during all-hands meetings, at company functions, and, when he wasn’t traveling, around the office.
As the rumor mill kicked into a frenzy and employees doomscrolled X, formerly Twitter, for any shreds of information, someone in the office latched on to what they saw as the most logical explanation and shouted, "Altman's running for president!" It created a momentary release of tension, before people realized this was not the case, and speculation started anew with fresh intensity and dread. Had Altman done something illegal? Maybe it was related to his sister, employees wondered. She had alleged in tweets that had gone viral a month before that her brother had abused her. Maybe it wasn't something illegal but ethically untoward, they speculated, perhaps related to Altman's other investments or his fundraising with Saudi investors for a new AI chip venture.
Sutskever posted an announcement in OpenAI's Slack. In two hours, he would hold a virtual all-hands meeting to answer employee questions. "That was the longest two hours ever," an employee remembers.
Sutskever, Murati, and OpenAI’s remaining executives came onto the screen side by side, stiff and unrehearsed, as the all-hands streamed to employees in the office and working from home.
Sutskever looked solemn. He was known among employees as a deep thinker and a mystic, regularly speaking in spiritual terms with a force of sincerity that could be endearing to some and off-putting to others. He was also a goofball and gentlehearted. He wore shirts with animals on them to the office and loved to paint them as well-a cuddly cat, cuddly alpacas, a cuddly fire-breathing dragon-alongside abstract faces and everyday objects. Some of his amateur paintings hung around the office, including a trio of flowers blossoming in the shape of OpenAI's logo, a symbol of what he always urged employees to build: "A plurality of humanity-loving AGIs."
Now, he attempted to project a sense of certainty to anxious employees submitting rapid-fire questions via an online document. But Sutskever was an imperfect messenger; he was not one that excelled at landing messages with his audience.
"Was there a specific incident that led to this?" Murati read aloud first from the list of employee questions.
"Many of the questions in the document will be about the details," Sutskever responded. "What, when, how, who, exactly. I wish I could go into the details. But I can't." Anyone curious should read the press release, he added. "It actually says a lot of stuff. Read it maybe a few times."
The response baffled employees. They had just received cataclysmic news. Surely, as the people most directly affected by the situation, they deserved more specifics than the general public.
Murati read off a few more questions. How did this affect the relationship with Microsoft? Microsoft, OpenAI's biggest backer and exclusive licensee of its technologies, was the sole supplier of its computing infrastructure. Without it, all the startup's work-performing research, training AI models, launching products-would grind to a halt. Murati responded that she didn't expect it to be affected. They had just had a call with Microsoft's chief executive Satya Nadella and chief technology officer Kevin Scott. "They're all very committed to our work," she said.
What about OpenAI's tender offer? Employees with a certain tenure had been given the option to sell what could amount to millions of dollars' worth of their equity. The tender was so soon that many had made plans to buy property, or already had. "The tender-we're, um, we're going to see," Brad Lightcap, the chief operating officer, waffled. "I am in touch with investors leading the tender and some of our largest investors already on the cap table. All have committed their steadfast support to the company."
After several more questions were met with vague responses, another employee tried again to ascertain what Sam had done. Was this related to his role at the company? Or did it involve his personal life? Sutskever once again directed people to the press release. "The answer is actually there," he said.
Murati read on from the document. "Will questions about details be answered at some point or never?"
Sutskever responded: "Keep your expectations low."
As the all-hands continued and Sutskever’s answers seemed to grow more and more out of touch, employee unease quickly turned into anger.
"When a group of people grow through a difficult experience, they often end up being more united and closer to each other," Sutskever said. "This difficult experience will make us even closer as a team and therefore more productive."
"How do you reconcile the desire to grow together through crisis with a frustrating lack of transparency?" an employee wrote in. "Typically truth is a necessary condition for reconciliation."
"I mean, fair enough," Sutskever replied. "The situation isn't perfect."
Murati tried to quell the rising tension. "The mission is so much bigger than any of us," she said.
Lightcap echoed her message: OpenAI's partners, customers, and investors had all stressed that they continued to resonate with the mission. "If anything, we have a greater duty now, I think, to push hard on that mission."
Sutskever again attempted to be reassuring. "We have all the ingredients, all of them: The computer, the research, the breakthroughs are astounding," he said. "When you feel uncertain, when you feel scared, remember those things. Visualize the size of the cluster in your mind's eye. Just imagine all those GPUs working together."
An employee submitted a new question. "Are we worried about the hostile takeover via coercive influence of the existing board members?" Murati read.
"Hostile takeover?" Sutskever repeated, a new edge in his voice. "The OpenAI nonprofit board has acted entirely in accordance to its objective. It is not a hostile takeover. Not at all. I disagree with this question."
That night, several employees gathered at a colleague’s house for a party that had been planned before Altman’s firing. There were guests from other AI companies as well, including Google DeepMind and Anthropic.
Right before the event, an alert went out to all attendees. "We are adding a second themed room for tonight: 'The no-OpenAI talk room.' See you all!" In the end, few people stayed long in the room. Most people wanted to talk about OpenAI.
Brockman had announced that afternoon that he was quitting in protest. Microsoft's Nadella, who had been furious about being told about Altman's firing only minutes before it happened, had put out a carefully crafted tweet: "We have a long-term agreement with OpenAI with full access to everything we need to deliver on our innovation agenda and an exciting product roadmap; and remain committed to our partnership, and to Mira and the team."
As rumors continued to proliferate, word arrived that three more senior researchers had quit the company: Jakub Pachocki and Szymon Sidor, early employees who had among the longest tenures at OpenAI, and Aleksander Mądry, an MIT professor on leave who had joined recently. Their departures further alarmed some OpenAI employees, a signal of a bleeding out of leadership and talent that could spook investors and halt the tender offer or, worse, ruin the company. At the party, employees grew more and more despondent and agitated. A dissolution of the tender offer would snatch away a significant financial upside to all their hard labor, to say nothing of a dissolution of the company, which would squander so much promise and hard work.
Also that night, the board and the remaining leadership at the company were holding a series of increasingly hostile meetings. After the all-hands, the false projection of unity between Sutskever and the other leaders had collapsed. Many of the executives who had sat next to Sutskever during the livestream had been nearly as blindsided as the rest of the staff, having learned of Altman's dismissal moments before it was announced. Riled up by Sutskever's poor performance, they had demanded to meet with the rest of the board. Roughly a dozen executives, including Murati and Lightcap, had gathered in a conference room at the office.
Sutskever was dialed in virtually along with the three independent directors: Adam D'Angelo, the cofounder and CEO of the question-and-answer site Quora; Tasha McCauley, an entrepreneur and adjunct senior management scientist at the policy think tank RAND; and Helen Toner, an Australian-born researcher at another think tank, Georgetown University's CSET, or Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
Under an onslaught of questions, the four board members repeatedly evaded making further disclosures, citing their legal responsibilities to protect confidentiality. Several leaders grew visibly enraged. "You're saying that Sam is untrustworthy," Anna Makanju, the vice president of global affairs, who had often accompanied Altman on his global charm offensive, said furiously. "That's just not our experience with him at all."
The gathered leadership pressed the board to resign and hand their seats to three employees, threatening to all quit if the board didn't comply immediately. Jason Kwon, the chief strategy officer, a lawyer who had previously served as OpenAI's general counsel, upped the ante. It was in fact illegal for the board not to resign, he said, because if the company fell apart, this would be a breach of the board members' fiduciary duties.
The board members disagreed. They maintained that they had carefully consulted lawyers in making the decision to fire Altman and had acted in accordance with their delineated responsibilities. OpenAI was not like a normal company, its board not like a normal board. It had a unique structure that Altman had designed himself, giving the board broad authority to act in the best interest not of OpenAI's shareholders but of its mission: to ensure that AGI, or artificial general intelligence, benefits humanity. Altman had long touted the board's ability to fire him as its most important governance mechanism. Toner underscored the point: "If this action destroys the company, it could in fact be consistent with the mission."
The leadership relayed her words back to employees in real time: Toner didn't care if she destroyed the company. Perhaps, many employees began to conclude, that was even her intention. At the thought of losing all of their equity, a person at the party began to cry.
The next day, Saturday, November 18, dozens of people, including OpenAI employees, gathered together at Altman’s $27 million mansion to await more news.
The three senior researchers who had quit, Pachocki, Sidor, and Mądry, had met with Altman and Brockman to talk about re-forming the company and continuing their work. To some, word of their discussions increased employee anxiety: A new OpenAI competitor could intensify the instability at the company. To others it offered hope: If Altman indeed founded a new venture, they would leave to go with him.
OpenAI's remaining leadership gave the board a deadline of 5 p.m. Pacific time that day: Reinstate Altman and resign, or risk a mass employee exodus from the company. The board members refused. Through the weekend, they frantically made calls, sometimes in the middle of the night, to anyone on their roster of connections who would pick up. In the face of mounting ire from employees and investors over Altman's firing, Murati was no longer willing to serve as interim CEO. They needed to replace her with someone who could help restore stability, or find new board members who could hold their own against Altman if he actually came back.
Prologue
A Run for the Throne
On Friday, November 17, 2023, around noon Pacific time, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Silicon Valley's golden boy, avatar of the generative AI revolution, logged on to a Google Meet to see four of his five board members staring at him.
From his video square, board member Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's chief scientist, was brief: Altman was being fired. The announcement would go out momentarily.
Altman was in his room at a luxury hotel in Las Vegas to attend the city's first Formula One race in a generation, a star-studded affair with guests from Rihanna to David Beckham. The trip was a short reprieve in the middle of the punishing travel schedule he had maintained ever since the company released ChatGPT about a year earlier. For a moment, he was too stunned to speak. He looked away as he sought to regain his composure. As the conversation continued, he tried in his characteristic way to smooth things over.
"How can I help?" he asked.
The board told him to support the interim chief executive they had selected, Mira Murati, who had been serving as his chief technology officer. Altman, still confused and wondering whether this was a bad dream, acquiesced.
Minutes later, Sutskever sent another Google Meet link to Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president and a close ally to Altman who had been the only board member missing from the previous meeting. Sutskever told Brockman he would no longer be on the board but would retain his role at the company.
The public announcement went up soon thereafter. "Mr. Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI."
On the face of it, OpenAI had been at the height of its power. Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, it had become Silicon Valley’s most spectacular success story. ChatGPT was the fastest-growing consumer app in history. The startup’s valuation was on the kind of meteoric ascent that made investors salivate and top talent clamor to join the rocket-ship company. Just weeks before, it had been valued at up to $90 billion as part of a tender offer it was in the middle of finalizing that would allow employees to sell their shares to said eager investors. A few days before, it had held a highly anticipated and highly celebrated event to launch its most aggressive slate of products.
Altman was, as far as the public was concerned, the man who had made it all happen. He had spent the spring and summer touring the world, reaching a level of celebrity that was leading the media to compare him to Taylor Swift. He had wowed just about everyone with his unassuming small frame, bold declarations, and apparent sincerity.
Before Vegas, he had once again been globe-trotting, sitting on a panel at the APEC CEO Summit, delivering lines with his usual dazzling effect.
"Why are you devoting your life to this work?" Laurene Powell Jobs, founder and president of the Emerson Collective and Steve Jobs's widow, had asked him.
"I think this will be the most transformative and beneficial technology humanity has yet invented," he said. "Four times now in the history of OpenAI-the most recent time was just in the last couple of weeks-I have gotten to be in the room, when we sort of push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward, and getting to do that is, like, the professional honor of a lifetime."
Shocked employees learned about Altman’s firing just as everyone else did, the link to the public announcement zipping from one phone to the next across the company. It was the chasm between the news and Altman’s glowing reputation that startled them the most. The company was by now pushing eight hundred people. These days, employees had fewer opportunities to meet and interact with their CEO in person. But his charming demeanor on global stages was not unlike how he behaved during all-hands meetings, at company functions, and, when he wasn’t traveling, around the office.
As the rumor mill kicked into a frenzy and employees doomscrolled X, formerly Twitter, for any shreds of information, someone in the office latched on to what they saw as the most logical explanation and shouted, "Altman's running for president!" It created a momentary release of tension, before people realized this was not the case, and speculation started anew with fresh intensity and dread. Had Altman done something illegal? Maybe it was related to his sister, employees wondered. She had alleged in tweets that had gone viral a month before that her brother had abused her. Maybe it wasn't something illegal but ethically untoward, they speculated, perhaps related to Altman's other investments or his fundraising with Saudi investors for a new AI chip venture.
Sutskever posted an announcement in OpenAI's Slack. In two hours, he would hold a virtual all-hands meeting to answer employee questions. "That was the longest two hours ever," an employee remembers.
Sutskever, Murati, and OpenAI’s remaining executives came onto the screen side by side, stiff and unrehearsed, as the all-hands streamed to employees in the office and working from home.
Sutskever looked solemn. He was known among employees as a deep thinker and a mystic, regularly speaking in spiritual terms with a force of sincerity that could be endearing to some and off-putting to others. He was also a goofball and gentlehearted. He wore shirts with animals on them to the office and loved to paint them as well-a cuddly cat, cuddly alpacas, a cuddly fire-breathing dragon-alongside abstract faces and everyday objects. Some of his amateur paintings hung around the office, including a trio of flowers blossoming in the shape of OpenAI's logo, a symbol of what he always urged employees to build: "A plurality of humanity-loving AGIs."
Now, he attempted to project a sense of certainty to anxious employees submitting rapid-fire questions via an online document. But Sutskever was an imperfect messenger; he was not one that excelled at landing messages with his audience.
"Was there a specific incident that led to this?" Murati read aloud first from the list of employee questions.
"Many of the questions in the document will be about the details," Sutskever responded. "What, when, how, who, exactly. I wish I could go into the details. But I can't." Anyone curious should read the press release, he added. "It actually says a lot of stuff. Read it maybe a few times."
The response baffled employees. They had just received cataclysmic news. Surely, as the people most directly affected by the situation, they deserved more specifics than the general public.
Murati read off a few more questions. How did this affect the relationship with Microsoft? Microsoft, OpenAI's biggest backer and exclusive licensee of its technologies, was the sole supplier of its computing infrastructure. Without it, all the startup's work-performing research, training AI models, launching products-would grind to a halt. Murati responded that she didn't expect it to be affected. They had just had a call with Microsoft's chief executive Satya Nadella and chief technology officer Kevin Scott. "They're all very committed to our work," she said.
What about OpenAI's tender offer? Employees with a certain tenure had been given the option to sell what could amount to millions of dollars' worth of their equity. The tender was so soon that many had made plans to buy property, or already had. "The tender-we're, um, we're going to see," Brad Lightcap, the chief operating officer, waffled. "I am in touch with investors leading the tender and some of our largest investors already on the cap table. All have committed their steadfast support to the company."
After several more questions were met with vague responses, another employee tried again to ascertain what Sam had done. Was this related to his role at the company? Or did it involve his personal life? Sutskever once again directed people to the press release. "The answer is actually there," he said.
Murati read on from the document. "Will questions about details be answered at some point or never?"
Sutskever responded: "Keep your expectations low."
As the all-hands continued and Sutskever’s answers seemed to grow more and more out of touch, employee unease quickly turned into anger.
"When a group of people grow through a difficult experience, they often end up being more united and closer to each other," Sutskever said. "This difficult experience will make us even closer as a team and therefore more productive."
"How do you reconcile the desire to grow together through crisis with a frustrating lack of transparency?" an employee wrote in. "Typically truth is a necessary condition for reconciliation."
"I mean, fair enough," Sutskever replied. "The situation isn't perfect."
Murati tried to quell the rising tension. "The mission is so much bigger than any of us," she said.
Lightcap echoed her message: OpenAI's partners, customers, and investors had all stressed that they continued to resonate with the mission. "If anything, we have a greater duty now, I think, to push hard on that mission."
Sutskever again attempted to be reassuring. "We have all the ingredients, all of them: The computer, the research, the breakthroughs are astounding," he said. "When you feel uncertain, when you feel scared, remember those things. Visualize the size of the cluster in your mind's eye. Just imagine all those GPUs working together."
An employee submitted a new question. "Are we worried about the hostile takeover via coercive influence of the existing board members?" Murati read.
"Hostile takeover?" Sutskever repeated, a new edge in his voice. "The OpenAI nonprofit board has acted entirely in accordance to its objective. It is not a hostile takeover. Not at all. I disagree with this question."
That night, several employees gathered at a colleague’s house for a party that had been planned before Altman’s firing. There were guests from other AI companies as well, including Google DeepMind and Anthropic.
Right before the event, an alert went out to all attendees. "We are adding a second themed room for tonight: 'The no-OpenAI talk room.' See you all!" In the end, few people stayed long in the room. Most people wanted to talk about OpenAI.
Brockman had announced that afternoon that he was quitting in protest. Microsoft's Nadella, who had been furious about being told about Altman's firing only minutes before it happened, had put out a carefully crafted tweet: "We have a long-term agreement with OpenAI with full access to everything we need to deliver on our innovation agenda and an exciting product roadmap; and remain committed to our partnership, and to Mira and the team."
As rumors continued to proliferate, word arrived that three more senior researchers had quit the company: Jakub Pachocki and Szymon Sidor, early employees who had among the longest tenures at OpenAI, and Aleksander Mądry, an MIT professor on leave who had joined recently. Their departures further alarmed some OpenAI employees, a signal of a bleeding out of leadership and talent that could spook investors and halt the tender offer or, worse, ruin the company. At the party, employees grew more and more despondent and agitated. A dissolution of the tender offer would snatch away a significant financial upside to all their hard labor, to say nothing of a dissolution of the company, which would squander so much promise and hard work.
Also that night, the board and the remaining leadership at the company were holding a series of increasingly hostile meetings. After the all-hands, the false projection of unity between Sutskever and the other leaders had collapsed. Many of the executives who had sat next to Sutskever during the livestream had been nearly as blindsided as the rest of the staff, having learned of Altman's dismissal moments before it was announced. Riled up by Sutskever's poor performance, they had demanded to meet with the rest of the board. Roughly a dozen executives, including Murati and Lightcap, had gathered in a conference room at the office.
Sutskever was dialed in virtually along with the three independent directors: Adam D'Angelo, the cofounder and CEO of the question-and-answer site Quora; Tasha McCauley, an entrepreneur and adjunct senior management scientist at the policy think tank RAND; and Helen Toner, an Australian-born researcher at another think tank, Georgetown University's CSET, or Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
Under an onslaught of questions, the four board members repeatedly evaded making further disclosures, citing their legal responsibilities to protect confidentiality. Several leaders grew visibly enraged. "You're saying that Sam is untrustworthy," Anna Makanju, the vice president of global affairs, who had often accompanied Altman on his global charm offensive, said furiously. "That's just not our experience with him at all."
The gathered leadership pressed the board to resign and hand their seats to three employees, threatening to all quit if the board didn't comply immediately. Jason Kwon, the chief strategy officer, a lawyer who had previously served as OpenAI's general counsel, upped the ante. It was in fact illegal for the board not to resign, he said, because if the company fell apart, this would be a breach of the board members' fiduciary duties.
The board members disagreed. They maintained that they had carefully consulted lawyers in making the decision to fire Altman and had acted in accordance with their delineated responsibilities. OpenAI was not like a normal company, its board not like a normal board. It had a unique structure that Altman had designed himself, giving the board broad authority to act in the best interest not of OpenAI's shareholders but of its mission: to ensure that AGI, or artificial general intelligence, benefits humanity. Altman had long touted the board's ability to fire him as its most important governance mechanism. Toner underscored the point: "If this action destroys the company, it could in fact be consistent with the mission."
The leadership relayed her words back to employees in real time: Toner didn't care if she destroyed the company. Perhaps, many employees began to conclude, that was even her intention. At the thought of losing all of their equity, a person at the party began to cry.
The next day, Saturday, November 18, dozens of people, including OpenAI employees, gathered together at Altman’s $27 million mansion to await more news.
The three senior researchers who had quit, Pachocki, Sidor, and Mądry, had met with Altman and Brockman to talk about re-forming the company and continuing their work. To some, word of their discussions increased employee anxiety: A new OpenAI competitor could intensify the instability at the company. To others it offered hope: If Altman indeed founded a new venture, they would leave to go with him.
OpenAI's remaining leadership gave the board a deadline of 5 p.m. Pacific time that day: Reinstate Altman and resign, or risk a mass employee exodus from the company. The board members refused. Through the weekend, they frantically made calls, sometimes in the middle of the night, to anyone on their roster of connections who would pick up. In the face of mounting ire from employees and investors over Altman's firing, Murati was no longer willing to serve as interim CEO. They needed to replace her with someone who could help restore stability, or find new board members who could hold their own against Altman if he actually came back.
Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle 1876-1976
Edited by Tyina L. Steptoe
Library Of America, 2025
[Publication date: June 17, 2025]
A vivid firsthand record of the stain of white supremacy and the outspoken resistance of Black and white Americans who envisioned a better, more just nation
W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified "the problem of the color-line" as the defining issue in American life in the twentieth century. The powerful writings gathered here reveal the many ways Americans, Black and white, fought against white supremacist efforts to police the color line, envisioning a better America in the face of disenfranchisement, segregation, and widespread lynching, mob violence, and police brutality.
Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle brings together speeches, pamphlets, newspaper and magazine articles, public testimony and appeals, judicial opinions, and poems and song lyrics from the end of Reconstruction in 1876 to the Boston busing crisis of 1974–76.
This volume includes writing by both famous and lesser known individuals, including:
W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified "the problem of the color-line" as the defining issue in American life in the twentieth century. The powerful writings gathered here reveal the many ways Americans, Black and white, fought against white supremacist efforts to police the color line, envisioning a better America in the face of disenfranchisement, segregation, and widespread lynching, mob violence, and police brutality.
Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle brings together speeches, pamphlets, newspaper and magazine articles, public testimony and appeals, judicial opinions, and poems and song lyrics from the end of Reconstruction in 1876 to the Boston busing crisis of 1974–76.
This volume includes writing by both famous and lesser known individuals, including:
- Frederick Douglass on the importance of voting rights
- Ida B. Wells on the scourge of lynching
- Richard T. Greener’s scathing critique of America’s “White Problem"
- Booker T. Washington’s historic Atlanta address
- John Marshall Harlan’s eloquent and prophetic dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson
- William Monroe Trotter’s dramatic White House confrontation with Woodrow Wilson
- Alain Locke’s tribute to “the New Negro”
- Thurgood Marshall on police brutality in wartime Detroit
- Rosa Parks’s appeal for justice for Recy Taylor
- Earl Warren’s landmark opinion in Brown
- Fannie Lou Hamer’s eloquent challenge to disenfranchisement in Mississippi
- and James Baldwin on the myths and meaning of the American Dream
ABOUT THE EDITOR:
Tyina Steptoe is an associate professor of history at the University of Arizona and the author of Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City (2015), which received awards from the Urban History Association and the Western History Association. Her writing has appeared in Time, American Quarterly, Journal of African American History, and Oxford American. She hosts “Soul Stories,” a weekly radio program on KXCI FM, which explores the history of rhythm and blues.