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The Books the Most Powerful People in A.I. Are Reading

Nick Frosst, Clément Delangue, Andrew Feldman, Daphne Koller and other power players shaping the future of artificial intelligence think you should add these titles to your reading pile.

The power lists Observer publishes aren't just rankings of success. They are blueprints of influence, charting the flow of capital and ideas across industries. When we started digging into the most influential names in artificial intelligence in 2026, we realized that beyond a list of names and titles, we were looking for a window into how each of our honorees thinks about the world. To that end, we asked them not only for their thoughts on the future of A.I. but also for book recommendations. The result is a reading list curated by the engineers, thought leaders, financiers and founders making the decisions molding the future of artificial intelligence (and, concurrently, the future of the growing number of industries the technology powers). There's no one unifying thread in their answers, and in that sense, the titles reveal little about the field's direction. What the selection of books below does offer is a glimpse into the priorities of the people stacking the building blocks of our technological future.

'The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity' by David Graeber

'The Myth of Sisyphus' by Albert Camus

'Dopamine Nation' by Dr. Anna Lembke

'Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard' by Chip and Dan Heath

'The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future' by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar

'Good to Great' by Jim Collins

'Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life' by Arnold Schwarzenegger

The 'Harry Potter' series by J.K. Rowling

'The Hard Thing About Hard Things' by Ben Horowitz

'The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity' by David Graeber

Recommended by Nick Frosst, co-founder of Cohere

The Dawn of Everything upends the idea that humanity started out living in small, equal groups that grew over time into large, unfair societies, positing instead that ancient people........

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