The second floor of OpenAI’s old headquarters had a theme. Each room was named after one of the most important inventions in human history: “Clock,” “Fire,” and, of course, “AGI,” or artificial general intelligence. I saw this in the spring of 2024, when I was interviewing some of the company’s researchers about recent technical advances. At the time, ChatGPT was still making embarrassing arithmetic errors, and the notion that the bot would ever rival human intelligence was dubious. But here, in the renovated shell of a former mayonnaise factory in San Francisco, AGI’s arrival was predestined.
This belief in AGI—a computer program with capabilities that rival or even exceed those of the human mind—is foundational to the mission of Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic, three of the most influential AI companies in the world. And the pursuit of that milestone is the subject of The AGI Chronicles, a new book by the tech reporter and Atlantic contributing writer Kevin Roose, which he describes as his attempt to document the decade “when the human monopoly on advanced intelligence ended, and a new world was born.” Roose, a prominent and well-connected commenter on the AI boom, follows the internecine world of the frontier AI companies in remarkable, at times almost insular, detail. Based on interviews with more than 150 researchers, executives, investors, and policy makers close to the technology’s development, The AGI Chronicles traces crucial moments across DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic from 2015 through early 2026 to figure out how we got to this very messy moment in AI, and who’s responsible for what happens next.
[Read: The singularity is not what it seems]
If you scan statements from executives such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, there is a sense of fatalism about the rise of AI. In my conversation with Amodei last year, he likened developing AI to operating an out-of-control bus: It can’t be stopped or even slowed, but perhaps it can be steered. In an interview last month, Altman called AI “an inevitability.” According to this framing, AI executives are simply conductors, doing their best to provide guardrails for an era that’s careering our way, whether anyone likes it or not. Roose’s book prompted me to consider a question that is often neglected in the mile-a-minute news cycle: Are the leading AI companies simply heralding an inevitable evolution of this technology, as many of them claim, or are they directing that advancement? The answer will have tremendous bearing on how we assign responsibility for the world taking shape around us.
The AGI Chronicles is of both minds on the topic. On the one hand, Roose is very explicit that he is archiving decisions made by a small group of people. “AGI was not inevitable,” he writes, but “invented, developed, and commercialized by a few hundred people.” On the other hand, sometimes the book reads like a natural history, describing a procession of events outside the control of any specific group of people, an almost geologic force sweeping the planet as “a new world was born.” He notes how, throughout the years, various companies and officials had yet to “wake up.” By 2024, he writes, “the idea of going back to the old world, to a time before all this, seemed more delusional than expecting the exponential to continue.”
At times, Roose’s book echoes the loss of agency professed by AI executives. Of course, the inevitability of any one outcome is a self-serving fabrication. There is no prophecy that a handful of Silicon Valley companies dictating their own rules, running roughshod over copyright law and environmental regulations while mucking up once-reliable internet services with AI features nobody asked for, will operate largely unencumbered. Industries take shape through decisions made by individual actors and investors, the collective desire of the public, and the action or inaction of regulators.
If you look to the late 1800s, for example, it would have seemed likely that electric cars would dominate the market in the following century. America’s best-selling car in 1897 was electric, and in the 1910s, Henry Ford was trying to develop an electric car with Thomas Edison. But a series of technological limitations and human decisions—including various financial missteps and harsh criticism from advocates of petrol-powered cars—changed the course of history, leaving a legacy that we’re reckoning with more than a century later.
In the 1950s, it seemed as if nuclear reactors were destined to dot the nation and power the future. But a series of political campaigns and spectacular errors—the anti-nuclear movement, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl—crushed the nuclear age before it ever really started. Then there was the Space Age and supersonic flight—there are so many seemingly inevitable technological eras that never quite made it, not so much because of technology itself as because of political and economic choices. There are, similarly, so many corporate behemoths—Standard Oil, Kodak, Bear Stearns—that, because of regulation or complacency or fraud, unraveled. The inverse holds for many technologies and companies considered inevitable today: Different regulatory environments, international agreements, or priorities for Pentagon labs could have stopped the development of an open and global internet, smartphones, social media.
When I recently called Roose to discuss his book and ask what he made of the industry’s frequently prophetic tone, he initially told me he believes that “nothing about this was inevitable. These were decisions made by people.” But he then said that he wanted to “complicate” that: “Once scaling the transformer worked, and once the scaling laws were documented,” Roose said, “I think it was inevitable that the companies building this stuff would push it as far as they possibly could.”
I’d like to further complicate that view. Beyond the urge to test the bounds of any technology and reap enormous profits, the industry has been shaped by very human decisions. AI researchers chose to train their models on troves of copyrighted works without seeking permission, leading to countless creators suddenly getting left out of the economic equation. OpenAI chose to rush a free-to-use ChatGPT to the market in late 2022, kicking off a hype cycle and a subsequent investment bonanza. Venture-capital, private-equity, and tech firms chose to sink untold billions into a still-unprofitable technology. Data-center developers chose to eschew solar panels in favor of combustion turbines, which they perceive as faster and more reliable. On the government side, Donald Trump has chosen to ignore or eliminate any substantive federal regulation of AI. An industry that negotiated royalty payments, prioritized clean energy, gave itself longer development cycles, or faced serious federal regulation might look entirely different.
The question of inevitability and responsibility may sound arcane, but it has real ramifications. In the Bay Area, tied up with the myth of AI’s inevitability is a sort of spiritual devotion: “Thank you to the machines, and the structure of reality, for letting us understand a little more,” Altman wrote on X this week. The more you treat AI as inevitable, the more it seems like a cosmic force rather than a product resulting from industrial and commercial design choices. The more you treat AI as inevitable, the less you can hold any company or person responsible for things going wrong. The executives, in this view, are only fractionally more empowered than us in deciding what happens next; more important, everyone else needs to wake up. As Altman put it to Politico earlier this month, “The world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology.”
In the months since Roose concluded his reporting, the AI industry and its products have risen to still-greater global prominence and triggered even greater fears. When I asked him what new chapters he might add if he were still writing, Roose said that he would end the book with the recent White House press conference in which Trump, Amodei, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, and several other tech executives addressed AI-safety concerns. He recalled a speech Amodei gave in Anthropic’s early days about how different parts of society would gradually become attuned to the transformative effects of this technology, beginning with AI firms and ending with the state. It felt, Roose told me, “like the prophecy had been fulfilled.”
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