karen hao

godmother of ai accountability
Former mit technology review senior editor and wall street journal correspondent. Author of empire of ai.

THE WORK

Karen Hao was a former MIT Technology Review senior editor and Wall Street Journal correspondent, she was the first journalist to investigate OpenAI from the inside and her book Empire of AI became an instant New York Times bestseller. She coined the term "ethics washing" to describe how companies build AI ethics teams for PR while ignoring real harm. Reporting across five continents, she has spent seven years interrogating the most urgent questions on accountability.

Karen is exceptionally good at exposing the architecture of the problem. Karen asks What is being extracted? She insists that we still have a say in what that future becomes.

WHY SHE’S A GODMOTHER

Because she asks the right questions: Who benefits? Who is made invisible? Whose Labour is being extracted? Whose resources are being consumed? And who gets to decide what the future looks like?

She was among the journalists who made ethics washing a mainstream language for the gap between technology companies’ ethical promises and their actual incentives. Her reporting has followed AI’s consequences from corporate boardrooms to data workers in the Global South and the environmental infrastructure beneath the AI boom.

Karen relentlessly interrogates the power structures shaping our future, surfacing the harms and dysfunction beneath the surface, so we have what we need to keep a say in what the future becomes.

Learn more about Karen and Empire of AI here.