I know it’s tempting to assume that when someone uses a similar title for a piece and topic to someone else that they must be plagiarizing the other person. And no-one particularly likes Eric Schmidt or Niall Ferguson, so it’s very easy to draw a line between their recently published (and almost entirely unreferenced and unsourced) article with Lisa Klaassen in Foreign Policy, “Empires of AI,” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/empires-artificial-intelligence-niall-ferguson-eric-schmidt, and other work that has a similar title and themes, in particular Karen Hao’s excellent book, Empire of AI. And this is exactly what quite a few people have been doing over on LinkedIn.
Now I loathe both Schmidt and Ferguson, and I don’t mind seeing them getting a virtual kicking. But it’s perhaps not as simple as that. I’m writing a review article which looks a the use of the concept of “empire” around AI, Silicon Valley, and the digital more broadly, and it’s not new. In 2025, Rachel Adams, published her book, The New Empire of AI, about the same time as Karen Hao published Empire of AI, and I am certain that both had been working on these books for years before without knowing that the other was doing so. And there were at least 3 or 4 other books published in 2025 which used “empire” to help explain the politics, political economy, or geopolitics of AI, not least Nick Srnicek’s Silicon Empires. Did any or all of them copy Tacheva & Ramasubramanian’s article “AI Empire”, which was published in the very well-known journal, Big Data & Society, in 2023? I doubt it, even though this wasn’t even the only piece by Tacheva & Ramasubramanian, which uses the concept of ‘AI Empire’ from this same year, 2 years before any of these books were published.
Thinking about digital corporate or national projects as imperial is an idea that lots of people have been thinking about, talking about, teaching about, and writing about for decades. And there have been many important books and articles with titles like Cloud Empires (Lehdonvirta, 2022) and Digital Empires (both Bradford, 2023; and Rachmad, 2024) in the last few years. It also has a significant overlap with work on colonialism and AI, and authoritarianism and the digital / AI, conceptual formations which have also been in the air and part of the discourse for a while. I’ve certainly been talking about these kinds of things in my classes for years. And go back far enough and you’ll find the influential media scholar, Mark Poster writing about “Information Empires” in 2004! Do I think that any of these other writers stole their ideas from Poster? Of course not! “Empire” and “imperialism” are concepts that are widely understood in academia, political commentary, and beyond, and commonly applied to our digital world. Poster himself was building on and critiquing Hardt & Negri’s 2000 book, “Empire”, which tried to reframe contemporary capitalism as a whole along these lines, and which was everywhere when I was finishing my PhD… and Ferguson is, whether you agree with him or not, a longstanding historian of empire in a more conventional sense, from even before this.
And before you ask, no, I am nowhere near the first person to tackle this subject for a review article. One of the reasons I started to take a different tack on this and go back to Poster was because my colleague, Quinn Slobodian, did a great review piece, “Digital Bandung” for The Ideas newsletter, https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/digital-bandung/, and he’s certainly not the only one.
Anyway, before you start a pile-on, however well-intentioned, of some obnoxious late-comers to the AI empires debate for plagiarizing any particular author, maybe take a step or two back…?
