Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Gideon Lewis-Kraus is a staff writer at The New Yorker who covers the intersection of advanced technology, intellectual life, and corporate power, with a particular focus on A.I. companies, the ideas that shape them, and the risks they create. His reporting and criticism follow how technical systems, academic theories, and business incentives meet in high-stakes conflicts, from courtroom battles in Silicon Valley to debates over existential risk. He brings a background in long-form reportage and books coverage to business stories, treating companies, movements, and markets as extensions of deeper arguments about responsibility and social trust.

A.I. firms, conflict, and political stakes

Lewis-Kraus’s recent work concentrates on the business and politics of artificial intelligence, especially where corporate rivalry and public risk collide. In a piece on the legal fight between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, he examines the Musk v.

Altman case not only as a clash between founders but as a vulgar spectacle that reveals how personal grievances and branding can overwhelm substantive questions about how A.I. should be governed. He writes a Talk of the Town column on A.I. politics that asks why the people who built transformative systems will not take the basic steps needed to avert catastrophic outcomes, tying the ambitions of leading labs to fears of extinction and regulatory paralysis.

He follows A.I. into electoral politics by reporting on a congressional primary shaped by the technology, showing how campaign messaging, donor networks, and policy proposals are increasingly organized around the promises and threats of machine learning.

His coverage of Project Maven traces how A.I. has been inserted into the military kill chain, detailing a secretive system that reduces the progression from target identification to destruction to a handful of clicks and asking what happens when corporate software becomes infrastructure for warfare. Across these stories, he treats A.I. businesses less as neutral innovators and more as political actors whose products, court strategies, and lobbying shape collective risk.

Ideas, movements, and moral responsibility

A core strand of his work follows the intellectual movements and moral arguments that grow up around technology and markets, especially in the worlds of effective altruism and rationalist thought. He has written on Sam Bankman-Fried and the complicity of effective altruism, showing how a philosophy of maximizing good can become entangled with speculative finance and permissive attitudes toward risk.

In a separate piece on Will MacAskill, he explores how longtermist thinking and existential-risk discourse migrate from academic and philanthropic circles into the decision-making of technologists and investors.

His coverage of Slate Star Codex and its collision with institutional media reconstructs how online communities devoted to Bayesian reasoning and techno-optimism react when subjected to traditional reporting, and what that reaction reveals about their understanding of accountability. He reviews a book on why some ideas spread while others die quietly, arguing through the lens of “Antimemetics” that notions gain traction not through their virtue but through their catchiness, and examining what that means for movements that present themselves as uniquely rational.

He has also written about Jonathan Haidt and the harms of social media, linking psychological research on adolescent well-being to the incentives of platforms and to public arguments about regulation and responsibility. These pieces treat business stories as stories about belief, tracing how abstract commitments to utility, free speech, or epistemic rigor turn into concrete choices about products, governance, and ethical lines.

Books, academia, and controversial science

Lewis-Kraus devotes substantial attention to books and academic research, using them as entry points into institutional and commercial power. In his review “Maybe We Already Have Runaway Machines,” he considers a book that compares modern corporations and states to A.I., arguing that these large institutions already behave like autonomous systems whose internal logic can outrun human control, and asking whether contemporary debates about A.I. should instead learn from the history of these entities.

He has written about the controversial rise of ancient DNA studies, tracing how new genetic tools reshape narratives about human history and spark disputes over methodology, ethics, and the ownership of data. His work on behavior genetics looks at how attempts to link genes and traits intersect with political anxieties, educational policy, and fears of determinism, treating scientific controversy as a business story about funding, prestige, and the market for big claims.

He has reported on a Chinese professor accused of being a spy and on the social dynamics of a Hasidic enclave, using both cases to show how institutions respond when questions of loyalty, secrecy, and cultural difference come to the fore.

Alongside these subjects, he has edited collections by Richard Rorty and Philip Rieff and teaches reporting in a graduate writing program, grounding his journalism in close reading and careful attention to argument. His books and academia coverage consistently connects scholarship and criticism to the operations of publishing, universities, and research labs as businesses.

Technology, capital, and fringe enterprises

Beyond A.I., he reports on the ways technology and capital produce strange new corners of commerce. His writing on Tezos introduces a blockchain project as a love-and-horror story, using its founders’ relationship and the project’s governance turmoil to illustrate how opaque technical promises, venture funding, and interpersonal conflict combine in speculative crypto ventures. He has chronicled a walk-in storefront private-jet dealership, treating the shop as a case study in how luxury aviation is sold as an approachable consumer product and how marketing reframes extreme wealth as lifestyle choice. Earlier work on the pandemic and “social trust” examines how adherence to public-health guidance depends on perceptions of institutional reliability, linking behavioral responses to the communications strategies of governments and companies.

A piece on Yelp and “The Lonely Crowd” reads crowd-sourced reviews through the lens of mid-century sociology, arguing that digital platforms rewire traditional forms of social judgment and reputational control. His coverage of the UFO renaissance, complete with audio segments and broadcast appearances, treats renewed interest in unidentified phenomena as a story about bureaucracy, secrecy, and the information practices of security agencies.

Across these disparate subjects, he tends to use particular businesses or subcultures as vantage points from which to examine broader patterns of trust, marketing, and institutional behavior.

Positioning and background

Lewis-Kraus has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2020, writing reportage and criticism across technology, academia, and books. Before joining the magazine, he worked in senior and contributing roles at The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and Harper’s, giving him experience in both narrative features and idea-driven essays across general-interest and technology-focused outlets.

He is the author of the memoir “A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful” and the Kindle Single “No Exit,” about tech startups, and has edited volumes by Richard Rorty and Philip Rieff. He teaches reporting in a graduate writing program, reinforcing a practice that combines deep reading, long-form structure, and close attention to how companies and institutions express their values.

Taken together, his background and current work position him as a reporter who treats business and technology stories as arguments about responsibility, risk, and the place of ambitious ideas in public life.