MIT’s Gender Studies program celebrates the journalist who proved Sam Altman is a crook, then explained that the real culprit was … colonialism?
Karen Hao has serious credentials. An MIT-trained mechanical engineer, Knight Science Journalism fellow, TIME100 AI honoree, and author of the most important book of 2025 nobody finished. She spent three years and 260 interviews digging into OpenAI before contriving her conclusion. “I’ve found only one metaphor that encapsulates the nature of what these AI power players are,” she writes. “Colonialist empires.”
Her evidence, to be fair, is impeccable. Co-founder Greg Brockman’s private diary reads: “I cannot believe that we committed to non-profit if three months later we’re doing b-corp — then it was a lie.” A federal jury in Oakland will weigh in shortly.
Altman, freshly returned from a Mumbai conference on democracy and human flourishing, warned the Federal Reserve last July that AI has “fully defeated” identity verification and a catastrophic fraud crisis looms — a concern he has addressed by lobbying vigorously against regulation. He is, in the precise technical sense, the arsonist chairing the fire safety committee.
MIT’s Women and Gender Studies program welcomed Hao back to campus to keynote the Gender, Empire and AI Symposium, convened at the College of Computing, eighth floor, where servers hum quietly below in what historians will recognize as the Belly of the Beast. Afternoon workshops address reproductive justice, AI propaganda, and “technofascism” — all in an engineering building, all before lunch.
The second keynote belongs to Paola Ricaurte, leader of the Latin American Feminist AI Research Network and co-author of the AI Decolonial Manyfesto — a document that spells “manifesto” wrong on purpose, as a decolonial act, explaining this proudly in the first paragraph.
Hao’s book is 400 pages, faithful to the postmodern corpus she was trained on. The old-fashioned word “grift” does not appear once.