The race to build artificial general intelligence is reshaping the technology industry, geopolitics, and the future of human labor, and no company sits closer to the center of that transformation than OpenAI. Karen Hao, a journalist who covered artificial intelligence for MIT Technology Review before joining The Atlantic, provides an inside account of OpenAI's evolution from a nonprofit research lab founded on idealistic principles to one of the most powerful and controversial technology companies in the world. Hao traces how the organization's original mission — to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity — came into tension with the enormous capital requirements of training ever-larger language models, leading to a restructuring that brought in billions of dollars from Microsoft and transformed OpenAI into a capped-profit company. She examines the internal debates over safety, the departures of key researchers who believed the company was moving too fast, and the dramatic boardroom crisis that briefly ousted CEO Sam Altman. Drawing on interviews with current and former employees, competitors, and policymakers, Hao places OpenAI's story within the broader landscape of the AI industry — the rivalry with Google DeepMind, the scramble for computing resources, and the growing alarm among governments about regulating a technology that its own creators acknowledge could pose existential risks. The book raises difficult questions about whether a technology with such profound implications for humanity can be responsibly developed by private companies driven by competitive pressure and investor expectations.