Author’s Note

This book is based on over 300 interviews with around 260 people and an extensive trove of correspondence and documents. Most of the interviews were conducted for this book. Some were drawn from my last seven years of reporting on OpenAI, the AI industry, and its global impacts for MIT Technology Review, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. Over 150 of the interviews were with more than 90 current or former OpenAI executives and employees, and a handful of contractors who had access to detailed documentation of parts of OpenAI’s model development practices. Another share of the interviews was with some 40 current and former executives and employees at Microsoft, Anthropic, Meta, Google, DeepMind, and Scale, as well as people close to Sam Altman.

Any quoted emails, documents, or Slack messages come from copies or screenshots of those documents and correspondences or are exactly as they appear in lawsuits. In cases where I do not have a copy, I paraphrase the text without quotes. There is one exception, which I mark in the endnotes. All dialogue is reconstructed from people’s memories, from contemporaneous notes, or, when marked in the endnotes, pulled from an audio recording or transcript. In most cases, I or my fact-checking team asked those recalling quotes to repeat or confirm them again several months apart to test their stability. Every scene, every number, every name and code name, and every technical detail about OpenAI’s models, such as the composition of their training data or the number of chips they were trained on, is corroborated by at least two people, with contemporaneous notes and documentation, or, in a few cases that I mark in the endnotes, with other media reporting. The same is true for most every other detail about OpenAI in the book. If I named someone, it does not mean I spoke to them directly. When I reference anyone’s thoughts or feelings, it is because they described that thought or feeling, either to me, to someone I spoke to, in an email or recording I obtained, or in a public interview.

This book is not a corporate book. While it tells the inside story of OpenAI, that story is meant to be a prism through which to see far beyond this one company. It is a profile of a scientific ambition turned into an aggressive ideological, money-fueled quest; an examination of its multifaceted and expansive footprint; a meditation on power. To that end, in the course of my reporting, I spent significant time embedding with communities on the ground in countries around the world to understand their histories, cultures, lives, and experiences grappling with the visceral impacts of AI. My hope is that their stories shine through in these pages as much as the stories within the walls of one of Silicon Valley’s most secretive organizations.

I reached out to all of the key figures and companies that are described in this book to seek interviews and comment. OpenAI and Sam Altman chose not to cooperate.