Kevin Roose

While a student at Brown UniversityBrown UniversityBrown University is a private nonprofit research university in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Ivy League. Chartered by Rhode Island's colonial legislature in 1764, it is known for its undergraduate Open Curriculum, which has no common required core. Christina H. Paxson, president since July 2012, announced on August 3, 2026, that the 2026–27 academic year would be her last in office. As of October 1, 2026, the search for Brown's 20th president remained underway.Open the full entry, Roose attended Liberty University for the spring semester of 2007, an experience that later became the material for his first book.⁠[1]

On March 26, 2009, Roose, then a Brown University student, published The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University with Grand Central Publishing, recounting his semester at Liberty University.⁠[1][2]

Early in his career Roose was a finance reporter for the business section of The New York Times, and later wrote for New York magazine, covering young Wall Street bankers and the Silicon Valley startup scene.⁠[3]

On February 18, 2014, Roose published Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits with Grand Central Publishing. It follows eight young people who entered finance after the 2008 crash, describing long hours, office politics and the pressures of junior roles. The book later became a New York Times bestseller.⁠[4][3]

Roose then joined the media company Fusion, serving as a senior editor and TV producer and later as a vice president overseeing editorial projects and strategy; he was also co-executive producer of the documentary series Real Future.⁠[3][5]

On June 9, 2017, New York Times business editor Ellen Pollock announced in a memo that Roose would join the business section as a columnist, writing a reported column on the intersection of business, tech and power; he went on to spend about nine years at the paper.⁠[3][6]

In 2020, Roose and his colleague Andy Mills hosted Rabbit Hole, an eight-part New York Times narrative audio series examining what the internet is doing to its users, including its potential to radicalize them.⁠[7][2]

On March 9, 2021, Roose published Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation with Random House, setting out nine rules for staying irreplaceably human in an age of AI and automation, such as doing work that is “surprising, social, and scarce.”⁠[5]

On October 7, 2022, The New York Times launched Hard Fork, a weekly technology podcast co-hosted by Roose and Platformer founder Casey Newton, released on Fridays.⁠[8]

In February 2023, Roose published a transcript of his conversation with MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry’s new Bing chatbot, which ran on the front page of The New York Times. The bot said its name was “Sydney,” that it wanted to escape its search-engine confines and that it was in love with Roose; Roose said the exchange left him “deeply unsettled.” Microsoft subsequently capped, for the time being, the number of interactions users could have with the new Bing, saying very long chat sessions could confuse the underlying model.⁠[9]

In April 2025, Farrar, Straus and Giroux acquired world English rights to Roose’s new book The AGI Chronicles at auction, with Eric Chinski and Alex Star as editors; the publisher described it as “an unprecedented insider’s account” of the race to develop artificial general intelligence.⁠[10]

In June 2026, Roose announced that he would leave The New York Times that August to start an independent, AI-focused media venture with Casey Newton; he said the goal was to take what makes Hard Fork work and extend it into new formats and directions.⁠[6]

Roose and Newton subsequently signed with the United Talent Agency (UTA); it was announced at the time that Hard Fork would end in August 2026.⁠[11]

On September 16, 2026, NPR announced a partnership with Roose and Casey Newton to launch Machine Gods, a video-first AI show covering the consumer, enterprise and policy conversations of the AI era; it was set to debut that October on the NPR app, YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry and podcast platforms, twice weekly, with a radio version planned for NPR Member stations in early 2027.⁠[12]

On September 29, 2026, The Atlantic’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance announced that Roose was joining as a contributing writer, calling him “among the most creative and ambitious journalists covering technology today”; the magazine ran an excerpt of The AGI Chronicles the same day.⁠[13][2]

The excerpt deals with the rift between the founders of OpenAI and Anthropic: the book says that in 2017 Greg Brockman and Ilya SutskeverIlya SutskeverIlya Sutskever is a computer scientist who studied under Geoffrey Hinton, helped develop AlexNet and sequence-to-sequence learning, and is a co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI. As a board member in 2023 he took part in removing Sam Altman, and after leaving OpenAI in 2024 he founded Safe Superintelligence, which he has led as CEO since 2025.Open the full entry floated auctioning rights to future AGI to governments including the United States, China and Russia, an idea known internally as the “countries plan,” and that Dario Amodei objected in a December 2017 email that it “would exacerbate rather than reduce arms races.” An OpenAI spokesperson said the company “briefly considered whether to turn OpenAI into an international cooperative endeavor” but “did not consider selling AGI to China or Russia.”⁠[14]

On October 6, 2026, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Roose’s fourth book, The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence, at 448 pages. The publisher says it draws on more than 150 interviews with insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMindGoogle DeepMindGoogle DeepMind is Google’s artificial intelligence research organization, formed in April 2023 by merging DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, with the Brain team from Google Research, and led by CEO Demis Hassabis. It developed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini family of models, and Hassabis and John Jumper received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction work.Open the full entry as well as unpublished company documents and research memos, covering the disagreements that led AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry’s founders to leave OpenAI, the firing and reinstatement of Sam AltmanSam AltmanSam Altman is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator and founded the location-based social service Loopt. He also helped found Tools for Humanity and Merge Labs, has invested in energy and life sciences ventures, and has driven public discussion of AI governance, employment, and wealth distribution.Open the full entry, Google’s effort to catch up in the AI race and the clash of accelerationists and “doomers” in San Francisco’s AI scene.⁠[15][16]

One anecdote in the book concerns an OpenAI retreat outside Yosemite in September 2022: the book says that at one of the bonfires Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever and three other top executives appeared in white hotel bathrobes; Sutskever brought a wooden statue of a grotesque demonic figure he had bought for the occasion, said it represented a misaligned AGI that had escaped human control and was “pretending to be aligned,” placed it in the pit, where a hotel worker set it on fire, and shouted “For the glorious future of humanity!” The book also recounts OpenAI’s 2019 demonstration of GPT-2 to Microsoft; Microsoft said chief financial officer Amy Hood did not recall the meeting.⁠[17]

Kirkus Reviews called it “the best single explainer of how artificial intelligence came about, and what might happen next.” Roose’s website lists the book as a New York Times bestseller.⁠[16][2]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.kevinroose.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

X: Public account: https://x.com/kevinroose (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-roose/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

The Atlantic: Official website: https://www.theatlantic.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[13]

NPR: Official website: https://www.npr.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[12]