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Fall 2025
Karen Hao is sitting in a chair and laughing. She is wearing an orange suit with a white blouse in front of an orange background. Karen Hao is sitting in a chair and laughing. She is wearing an orange suit with a white blouse in front of an orange background.
Tony Luong for KarenHao.com
Fall 2025 On the Side

Meet Karen

Karen Hao ’11 is the right journalist to understand the perils and promise of artificial intelligence.

Written by:
Sean Ramsden H'65

It seems like everyone has an opinion on AI, or artificial intelligence, but they’re not all Karen Hao ’11. After earning a mechanical engineering degree from MIT and working as an application engineer at the first Google X spinoff startup, Karen has spent more than seven years writing about AI for The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and as the senior AI editor at the MIT Technology Review, and the understanding she’s gained has produced her first book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI.

“AI intersects with anything and everything,” Karen told Puck’s John Heilemann on his Impolitic podcast in June about moving from engineering to journalism and her choice to focus on AI and its impact on society. The current lack of accountability by the companies developing these technologies is “the threat we are missing,” she says.

“It’s not that AI is going rogue; the threat is that people are using AI as a narrative cover to amass extraordinary levels of power that lead them to return us to the age of empire and erode
democratic ideals and the agency of people all around the world.”