"Exciting and brilliantly reported . . . Roose makes the technology understandable while also conveying the historic nature of a new world being born." —Walter Isaacson, author of Elon Musk

A New York Times Most Anticipated Nonfiction Book of 2026

This is the story of the twenty-first century’s Manhattan Project: the race to create artificial general intelligence.

This program is read by the author.

For the last decade, a handful of AI companies have been racing to build the most powerful technology in history: artificial general intelligence, or AGI—a computer system capable of outdoing humans at almost anything. Some of them hoped AGI would cure diseases and heal the planet. Others feared it could kill everyone on Earth. They decided to build it anyway.

Kevin Roose’s The AGI Chronicles is the definitive, behind-the-scenes account of the trillion-dollar sprint to create AGI. Drawing on more than 150 interviews with insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, as well as unpublished company documents and research memos, Roose reconstructs the most consequential decade in tech history. He takes us inside the rooms where researchers watch large language models learn to talk, reason, and code at superhuman speed. He brings us to the White House, where top officials grapple with a technology that is improving too fast to understand, let alone regulate. He offers new details on the disagreements that led the founders of Anthropic to defect from OpenAI, and fresh reporting on Sam Altman’s dramatic firing—and equally dramatic reinstatement—as CEO. He gives us the inside story of Google’s frantic attempt to catch up to the AI frontier. And he ushers us into the San Francisco AI scene, where “accelerationists” in hacker houses and “doomers” at AI safety summits battle each other for supremacy.

With reportorial rigor and page-turning suspense, The AGI Chronicles reveals the true story of the most high-stakes technological quest in human history—an audacious attempt to create a new, alien form of intelligence that could either save humanity or destroy it.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux