After OpenAI CEO Sam Altman launched ChatGPT in 2022, the race for dominance in the field of artificial intelligence hit warp speed. Silicon Valley has poured billions of dollars into developing AI, building data centers, and promising a future free from the chains of unfulfilling work across the globe.

But in “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI,” tech reporter Karen Hao pulls back the curtain, unveiling the human and environmental cost of artificial intelligence and the colonial ambitions undergirding Silicon Valley's efforts to fuel the rise of AI.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks to Hao about her book and the dawn of the AI empire. “Empires similarly consolidate a lot of economic might by exploiting extraordinary amounts of labor and not actually paying that labor sufficiently or at all,” says Hao. “So that's how they are able to amass wealth — because they're not actually distributing it.”

“The speed at which they're constructing the infrastructure for training and deploying their AI models” is what shocks Hao the most, as “this infrastructure is actually not technically necessary, and ... somehow the companies have effectively convinced the public and governments that it is. And therefore there's been a lot of complicity in allowing these companies to continue building these projects.”

“They have effectively been able to use this narrative of [artificial general intelligence] to accrue more capital, land, energy, water, data. They've been able to accrue more resources — and critical resources — than pretty much anyone in history,” Hao says, warning of "the complete aggressive and reckless” growth of AI infrastructure, but stresses that none of this is inevitable. “There is a very clear path for how to unlock the benefits of AI without accepting the colossal cost of it.”

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We're excited to share another episode of The Intercept’s new podcast Collateral Damage. The investigative series examines the half-century-long war on drugs, its enduring ripple effects, and the devastating consequences of building a massive war machine aimed at the public itself. Hosted by Radley Balko, an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years, each episode takes an in-depth look at someone who was unjustly killed in the drug war.

Veronica and Charity Bowers, a young Christian missionary and her daughter, are killed when the Peruvian Air Force shoots down a small passenger plane in 2001. The plane had been mistaken for a drug smuggling plane and was shot down as part of a joint anti-drug agreement between the CIA and the Colombian and Peruvian governments.

President Donald Trump has made the Bowers's deaths newly and urgently relevant since he began ordering the U.S. military to strike down alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean in September 2025. By early November, the U.S. had launched a total of 17 strikes, killing at least 70 people, and those figures seem to grow almost by the day. The attacks are illegal under both U.S. and international law. The administration also provided no documentation of the alleged drug trafficking.

The attack on the Bowers family pierced the veil that obscures drug war foreign policy because of their nationality, skin color, and relatability. More than 20 years ago, House Oversight Committee hearing members Jan Schakowsky and Elijah Cummings demanded accountability after U.S. drug interdiction forces killed the Bowers. They demanded to know how such a mistake could happen, and how we could prevent the loss of innocent life going forward.

“The kind of action we saw in Peru … amounts to an extrajudicial killing,” said Schakowsky at the time. Cummings added, “The Peruvian shootdown policy would never be permitted as a domestic United States policy precisely because it goes against one of our most sacred, due process principles — namely, that all persons are presumed innocent until proven guilty.”

Now, a new administration openly celebrates summary execution of alleged drug smugglers without a hint of due process, and is now threatening to topple another government to prevent the U.S. from sating its appetite for illicit drugs.

The story of Veronica and Charity Bowers is a stark reminder of how aggressive drug policy is wasteful and futile, how we never seem to learn from past failures, and how the generations-long effort to stop people from getting high also — and necessarily — treats human lives as expendable.

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