Have you been feeling trapped in an endless cycle of artificial intelligence hype and panic? You’re not alone.
It’s a chaotic time to make sense of the industry that’s reshaping our lives, whether or not we like it. Last week, another AI company employee publicly resigned, warning the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade”. Despite these dire warnings, AI companies have seen “otherworldly” surges in revenue and driven the US stock markets to new highs as they continue to push AI tools into everything from public school classrooms to law enforcement agencies, as well as rushing to put up new datacenters across the country.
Thankfully, the Guardian’s tech reporters – and a few other tech experts we respect – are here to help. We’ve compiled an essential reading list of smart books that explain and critique the AI industry; books that, while flawed, illustrate key viewpoints in the AI debates; and a few books that provide deeper political and social context, including some works of speculative fiction.
The best books on the AI industry
Empire of AI – Karen Hao
The most intensively reported book on the AI industry so far, Empire of AI covers the rise of OpenAI, as well as the formation of Anthropic and OpenAI chief Sam Altman’s split with Elon Musk. Parts of the book can feel a bit inside baseball, but the reporting is great and shows how the key American AI companies brought us to this point. Some early reviews of the book in 2025 suggested Hao’s take on the industry was overly negative: she has since been entirely vindicated.
Project Maven – Katrina Manson
An in-depth look at how the US military and Palantir worked together to build autonomous weapons and surveillance systems that are an actual catastrophic threat – not an imagined one.
Hyperscale – Paris Marx
From the journalist and host of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, this is a deep investigation into the physical impact of AI data centers around the world, and the toll they are taking on local communities and the global environment.
Your Face Belongs to Us – Kashmir Hill
A bestselling book on the rise of Clearview AI, the facial recognition company that has provided sweeping surveillance powers to law enforcement, businesses and billionaires, by building a massive database of online images.
The AI Con – Emily M Bender and Alex Hanna
In response to claims that AI will soon far surpass all human capabilities, and that the technology is advancing so quickly it’s on the verge of becoming a new life form, the authors of The AI Con have a simple response: “LOL” and “they wish”. These two tech critic academics argue that this kind of rhetoric is “AI hype” – lies and exaggerations that are helping rich people make more money “by justifying data theft, motivating surveillance capitalism, and devaluing human creativity”.
Flawed books on AI (that still might be worth reading)
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies – Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares
If you want to understand the perspective of the people panicking that AI will destroy humanity, this book is a good place to start. It’s a “doomer classic” that has been described as a book-length version of the tweet that made everyone freak out this past week. Unfortunately for readers, its predictions of doom are based more on grand thought experiments than on an engagement with how AI is currently playing out in the world. The book “reads like a Scientology manual”, a New York Times reviewer wrote. For context, Yudkowsky’s other writings include a nearly 700,000-word work of Harry Potter fan fiction in which Harry applies the scientific method to magic.
Superintelligence – Nick Bostrom
This 2014 book is one of the foundational AI texts for people like Elon Musk, who, alongside Bill Gates, has publicly praised the bestseller. While the book is useful as a way of understanding the evolution of arguments about how a superintelligent AI might doom society, it’s worth noting that the author is a controversial Swedish-born philosopher who was forced to apologize in 2023 for a decades-old email in which he claimed “Blacks are more stupid than whites” and used the N-word. In 2024, Oxford quietly shut down the academic institute he had run, and Bostrom resigned.
Genesis: artificial intelligence, hope, and the human spirit – Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, Craig Mundie and Eleanor Runde
Are you looking for AI insights from a man who faced frequent, wide-ranging and substantial allegations of war crimes? Astonishingly, Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state who died in 2023, co-authored a bestselling 2024 book on AI with a billionaire former Google CEO, a less-wealthy former Microsoft executive, and a young lawyer who worked as Kissinger’s researcher. The authors suggest that AI’s ability to provide swift answers without explaining how it got them might end our current “age of reason” and lead humanity back to a “pre-modern acceptance of unexplained authority”. They also raise the possibility that “the companies that own and develop AI will accrue totalizing social, economic, military and political power”, or that AI itself might become an all-powerful “philosopher king”. OpenAI’s ChatGPT listed this as one of the five best books on artificial intelligence.
The Technological Republic – Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska
This manifesto by the CEO of Palantir was described by one Guardian colleague as one of the worst-written books he had ever read. It includes rambling attacks on the Palestinian American academic Edward Said, and goes further than Kissinger and his co-authors by more or less calling for turning tech leaders into philosopher kings. Prose aside, the book provides an important window into what top tech CEOs actually believe, and the way they regard AI and tech as a new nuclear bomb – which, in their view, is a good thing.
Deeper context: history, ideology and fiction
The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State – Jill Lepore
A historical look at the political and industrial movements that have wanted to cede human agency and democratic rule to automation and authoritarianism. Just published, and a surprisingly fun read!
More Everything Forever – Adam Becker
Written by a science journalist, this book provides a good overview of the ideological origins of our current tech leaders. Exploring accelerationism, rationalism, doomerism and more, the book emphasizes how strange and detached from reality these powerful people’s belief systems are.
Automating Inequality – Virginia Eubanks
This 2018 book predates the generative AI boom, but it provides an essential view into how automated systems and algorithms reinforce social inequality. Modern AI has supercharged these same capabilities and is getting integrated into every critical system, making the book’s insights into the harms of automated inequality even more important.
Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future – Anita Say Chan
Our current systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination are rooted in 19th-century campaigns against immigration and in favor of eugenics, the practice of selectively breeding humans to improve their intelligence or racial dominance, Chan argues. The book highlights the evolution of “techno-eugenicists” and the persistence of feminist and immigrant activists who have fought against them, and is recommended by Seeta Peña Gangadharan, an associate professor at the London School of Economics who studies the community impact of data-driven technologies.
Prophecy: Prediction, Power and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI – Carissa Véliz
Tracing the parallels between ancient seers, court astrologers, and contemporary algorithms, an Oxford University philosopher argues that “the main promise of prediction is not knowledge of the future but domination over others.” Another recommendation from Peña Gangadharan and her LSE doctoral student, Anna Osterberg, who studies the political dynamics of online communities.
I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
Though it was first published in 1950, Asimov’s collection of short stories on the ethics of human-robot interactions remains influential, including his “Three Laws of Robotics”, starting with: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” As humor writer Alex Blechman has pointed out, classic science fiction books and films remain deeply influential in the tech world, even though many tech companies seem set on engineering precisely the kinds of dangerous outcomes that science fiction warned against.
The Lost Books of the Odyssey – Zachary Mason
In 2007, a computer scientist from Palo Alto published a collection of 46 retellings of passages from the Odyssey – a book that riffs on the way narratives get revised, fragmented, and reborn. Mason was actively imagining the prose AI might produce long before the technology was available. Asked for his recommendations on AI-related books, Robin Sloan, a fiction author and media and technology writer, chose this novel, which he called “the first book of the LLM era, even though it was written entirely, and beautifully, by a human”. He says the book “has a lot to say about multiplicity, deep stories and symbols”.
Labyrinths – Jorge Luis Borges
Sloan also made the case for a classic, Borges’ short story collection Labyrinths, as a book that “gets your head in the right place to think usefully and richly about the deep weirdness and enormity of language models”. The collection includes one of Borges’ most famous stories, The Library of Babel, first published in 1941, which describes and wrestles with a plan for an infinite library.
Nick Robins-Early contributed reporting
