The Race to Stop AI’s Threats to Democracy

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the AI Action Summit in Paris in FebruaryBlondet Eliot/Abaca/Zuma

OpenAI and its revolutionary chatbot ChatGPT have single-handedly accelerated AI’s boom and threatened to upend much of how we work, create, learn, and communicate in the process. But when OpenAI was founded a decade ago, the company’s approach to artificial intelligence wasn’t taken seriously in Silicon Valley. Tech journalist Karen Hao has been covering OpenAI’s astounding rise for years and is the author of Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. She says that while many in Silicon Valley warn of AI’s sci-fi-like threats, the real risks are already here.

“We are allowing the tech industry to consolidate this extraordinary degree of resources unlike anything ever before,” she tells More To The Story host Al Letson. “We thought that they were already powerful during the social media era. In the AI era, the amount of resources and the amount of influence and domination that they now have is of a fundamentally different degree.”

The Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones, Reveal, and More To The Story, is currently suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.

On this week’s More To The Story, Hao sounds the alarm about the risks to the planet from AI’s growth, examines the Trump administration’s efforts to deregulate the industry, and explains why the version of AI being developed by Silicon Valley could destabilize democracy.

This episode first aired in October 2025.

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