AI is upending the planet in real time, and its path of unchecked development threatens to erode democracy and return us to an age of empire, where a small group of companies dictates our future. It doesn’t have to be this way, says Karen Hao, a Silicon Valley engineer-turned-award-winning-journalist. She is the featured speaker at this Center for Business Ethics event on March 5, 2026, 5:00 to 6:30 p.m..

Hao’s epic and urgent book Empire of AI—an instant New York Times bestseller called a “heroic work” by Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism)—is the culmination of her years of insider access to OpenAI and her original reporting, spanning five continents. In captivating keynotes, packed with hard-won insights, she assembles the fullest picture yet of the most consequential tech arms race in history. She shows us just how thoroughly AI will alter society, and, more importantly, what role we can all play in actively shaping AI so that it benefits everyone. “The way we develop technology is now fundamentally broken,” Hao says. “But I truly believe that we can fix it.”

“Our lives are about to be remade by artificial intelligence. If you ever wondered whether all of this is inevitable, whether we could save a little bit of our democracy in the age of AI, then read this book!” Daron Acemoglu, Winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences

Called “one of the foremost tech journalists covering AI” by Dr. Joy Buolamwini, Karen Hao writes for publications like The Atlantic and leads the Pulitzer Center’s AI Spotlight Series, which trains journalists around the world on how to cover artificial intelligence.

In Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (Penguin Press, 2025), Hao, the first journalist to ever profile OpenAI, tells the behind-the-scenes story of how a cadre of the most powerful companies in human history is reshaping the world in its image. “Excellent and deeply reported” (The New York Times), Empire of AI is a page-turning thriller, an “essential work of public education” (Zuboff), and a revelatory portrait of the people controlling this technology. It is the jaw-dropping story of ambition and ego, hype and speculation, plunder and destruction, politics and labor, and, of course, money and power—a brilliant and deeply necessary look at the industry defining our era, and what the future holds.

Hao 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 has been cited by Congress, featured in university curriculums, and remade into museum exhibits. She has won numerous accolades, including an American Humanist Media Award and a National Magazine Award for Journalists Under 30.

Hao also sits on the AI advisory board of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Prior to journalism, she was an application engineer at the first startup to spin out of Google, and she received a B.S. in mechanical engineering and minor in energy studies from MIT.

This event is co-sponsored by the Technology, Innovation Law, and Ethics (TILE) Institute at Seattle University School of Law.

About the Center for Business Ethics

Established in 2011, the Center for Business Ethics (CBE) at the Albers School of Business and Economics partners with business leaders, scholars, faculty, students and alumni to critically examine ethical issues in business and the role business can play in advancing the common good.

The Center for Business Ethics is also the administrative home of the Northwest Ethics Network (NWEN), an independent group of ethics and compliance professionals representing over 30 Pacific Northwest organizations.