Top AI Books to Read in 2025

Which non-technical AI books matter in 2025? 📚 An ecosystem and review analysis. 🏞️

Howard Yu with the book Reshuffle by Sangeet Paul Choudary.

This is the first edition in a new series on the best AI books.

I’m a huge fan of celebrating the Books written by people in our community around AI. Books go deeper than Newsletter articles about specific aspects of AI and encompass months or even years of research, instead of days or hours. I asked Paul Morrison of AI Book Review to help us discover some of the best in recent times.

This is a chance to celebrate some of the authors and makers of these books and show our support.

If that is something you think matters please consider sharing this with someone you know.

AI Book Review

Distilling the ideas that matter from the ocean of AI writing and media.

Paul’s project is all-encompassing: he believes:

• AI is many things - not one, constant thing

• AI is connected to wider changes - it doesn’t exist in a vacuum

• AI has the power to be massively beneficial, and damaging

• AI works well where there is careful design and deep knowledge

• We need to be smart to make the most of this opportunity

• Something special is happening right now

• The future is unknown to all

Support his project:

Paul Morrison the writer behind AI Book Review is uniquely qualified to be our guide through AI books. I was impressed by his criteria of how he evaluates the ecosystem in a data-centric way.

In an age of increasing AI slop and synthetic shallow content, I believe in supporting book culture. Paul is doing great work.

Q&A Snippet 💡

How did you get here? Paul Morrison: I have worked as a business and technology adviser for over two decades (out of London). I help companies to work smarter and make the most of new technologies. Research has always been a part of this, including podcasting and writing for leading tech companies such as Accenture, Hewlett Packard and WNS. For nearly 10 years I led the Hackett Digital Awards, shining a light on the most measurably impactful analytics, automation and AI projects from businesses around the world.

Shirin Khosravi Jam explains which books she read in this linkedin post.

Pictured above: Shirin Khosravi Jam writes the popular Newsletter, Jam with AI.

Go to Paul’s Newsletter to learn more:

Read Reviews

Recent Short book reviews by Paul. AI Book Review is a relatively new Newsletter, and is part of my commitment to supporting emerging writers.

• Superagency

• Reshuffle by Sangeet Paul Choudary

• The Thinking Machine

Q&A Snippet 👀

How does AI fit in? Paul Morrison: Over this period, the ‘technology question’ has become ever louder. The since 2022 it has been amazing to see powerful, artificial intelligence come into full view. For all of us it is an exciting or even unsettling time. One question stands out - how will AI change the way we live and work? As a father of 3, I can feel just how much depends on this.

For this list Paul decided to exclude technical Machine Learning books to focus on AI books for non-technical readers. Many of my readers of AI Supremacy are also AI enthusiasts who may not necessarily have a technical background.

The Top 20 AI Books of 2025

By Paul Morrison, October, 2025.

So many AI books, so little time! To help all you busy readers uncover the titles that really resonate for you, welcome to our perspectives on the Top 20 AI books of 2025. Plus in the sections below we provide new analysis of the overall landscape, and a mini-capsule with links for each book.

The Top 20 is based on a mix of art and science. The science consists of the 15 most popular AI books on Amazon and Goodreads, as of late 2025. These are the AI books that have proven themselves with readers as relevant, engaging and high quality. This crop of outstanding AI writing paints a picture of what we want to read. 4 different preoccupations emerge:

• Navigating AI - The fundamentals - what is AI and what does it mean?

• Boom versus Doom - Will AI make or break humanity?

• AI at Work - Unpacking what AI means for business

• Movers and Shakers - The stories behind AI’s leading personalities and businesses

The art comes in the form of 5 additional ‘Wildcards’ - books too offbeat to feature in the bestseller lists (yet), or that look up at the horizons of the world in which AI will grow. Together they provide context and challenge to the bestseller canon.

Congratulations to all the listed books (listed alphabetically by title below)! Of course there are great books that didn’t make this list. Some by accident, and others by design - for example technical manuals and fiction are excluded (another time!).

Let us know what you loved this year, what you hated, and what you want to read about next year!

OR

Q&A Snippet 🔎

What is AI Book Review? Paul Morrison: There are a lot of AI books out there! But people don’t have time to read dozens of AI books. So AI Book Review’s mission is to distill what really matters from the best writing, old and new.

The goal is to do this differently. There are obviously other sources of book reviews. But by obsessing about AI books, I want to provide a resource that tracks the debate over time and across authors: How are leading writers thinking about AI? How do they differ? How is the debate changing? What are the gaps? What is the big picture?

THE LIST: Top 20 AI Books of 2025 - The Winners

First let’s frame some of the standout books we found in our analysis:

Navigating AI 🗺️

• How To Think About AI: A Guide For The Perplexed - Richard Susskind

• The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025 - Dwarkesh Patel , Gavin Leech

• These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means - Christopher Summerfield

The folks at Limitless Podcast interviewed him about the book in July, 2025.

Boom vs Doom 💥

• If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All - Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares.

• More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity - Adam Becker

• Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future - Reid Hoffman, Greg Beato

• The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want - Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna

AI at Work 🚧

• Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life - Pascal Bornet, Jochen Wirtz, Tom Davenport, David De Cremer, Brian Evergreen, Phil Fersht, Rakesh Gohel, Shail Khiyara, Nandan Mullakara, Pooja Sund

• AI First: The Playbook for a Future-Proof Business and Brand - Adam Brotman, Andy Sack

• More Human: How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead - Rasmus Hougaard, Jacqueline Carter, Marissa Afton, Rob Stembridge

• Reshuffle: Who wins when AI restacks the knowledge economy - Sangeet Paul Choudary

Movers and Shakers 🏃

• AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence - Gary Rivlin

• Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI - Karen Hao

• The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future - Keach Hagey

• The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip - Stephen Witt

Hard to miss all of Karen Hao’s incredible podcasts. Buy the book! Image credit: MIT.

Wildcards 🐾

• Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity - Paul Kingsnorth

• Beast in the Machine: How Robotics and AI Will Transform Warfare and the Future of Human Conflict - George M. Dougherty

• Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future - Dan Wang

• The Light Eaters: How the New Science of Plant Intelligence Extends Our View of Life on Earth - Zoë Schlanger

• The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines from Automata to AI - David Hajdu

DIGGING DEEPER (1) - Behind the Numbers

To work out our list of the bestsellers, we crunched the reader review numbers on Goodreads and Amazon. First up we looked at the total number of reviewer ratings on these platforms:

To be clear, all books have done very well to feature in this select group - they have all in their different ways made a dent in the AI debate. However the standout result is Empire of AI by Karen Hao , an excoriating behind the scenes account of OpenAI. This is easily the most rated book of the year both for Amazon and Goodreads (the scale above is logarithmic so the gaps are exponential!).

Empire of AI is followed by The Thinking Machine (Stephen Witt’s unpacking of Jensen Huang and Nvidia), and Superagency (Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato on ‘What Could Possibly Go Right With AI’). Along with The Optimist by Keach Hagey (a more positive interpretation of the OpenAI story), 3 out of 4 of the top books are about ‘Movers and Shakers’: biographies / business biographies that tell the story of the AI industry’s icons.

In our second analysis, we move beyond total number of ratings to average reader scores, and the picture is somewhat different. Again all books in this analysis are strong performers. Leading the pack is

Sangeet Paul Choudary’s Reshuffle, on sidestepping the AGI/intelligence debate to focus instead on how AI is changing the systems that underpin work and life. Not far behind are The Thinking Machine, and More Everything Forever by Adam Becker.

The biggest anomaly in the data is Superagency - Amazon readers are much keener on this book than are Goodreads readers. Richard Susskind’s ‘How to Think about AI’ is the opposite. For the most part other titles show no such difference… Who knew?!

Note on approach: Books focused on AI first published in 2025. Titles with limited reviews excluded. Data accurate as of September 2025.

Editor’s Note

In our next edition of the series we’ll dig deeper into the AI Book Universe and give a more editorial summary of each one on our list of 20.

So obviously this is not just a listicle but an actual analysis of the creative landscape of AI books that also charts how humanity’s fascination with the topic of AI is evolving in 2025 and as we head into 2026 and beyond.

Thanks to all the incredible book authors listed here, and those that we missed. You help to give us clarity in very uncertain times.

Who wins when AI restacks the knowledge economy:

Top 20 - Books on Navigating AI

Continues more next time.

Q&A Snippet 🌄

How would you describe your views? Paul Morrison: I feel I have a pretty eclectic outlook, with a foot in many camps. I have a background in systems building, a business adviser’s preoccupation with real ROI, and the long term view of a history undergrad. It is a broad mix but hopefully one that enables me to root out what really matters. I don’t see myself as a techno booster or doomer, rather an optimist and a humanist. And whilst I see that technology is often a force for good, I recognise we can take little for granted with AI today.

Happy reading. 📚

❓ Feedback 🗳️

Giving me added feedback on which articles you prefer, helps me decide how to better serve you my reader.

Appreciating your support of my Newsletter and the guest contributors like Paul who extend our coverage in new directions and learning.

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Addendum - Appendix

If you want to go to a store page, follow the links:

Directory - Who made the list: 🙋🏻‍♀️

• How To Think About AI: A Guide For The Perplexed - Richard Susskind

• The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025 - Dwarkesh Patel , Gavin Leech

• These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means - Christopher Summerfield

• If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All - Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares.

• More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity - Adam Becker

• Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future - Reid Hoffman, Greg Beato

• The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want - Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna

• Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life - Pascal Bornet, Jochen Wirtz, Tom Davenport, David De Cremer, Brian Evergreen, Phil Fersht, Rakesh Gohel, Shail Khiyara, Nandan Mullakara, Pooja Sund

• AI First: The Playbook for a Future-Proof Business and Brand - Adam Brotman, Andy Sack

• More Human: How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead - Rasmus Hougaard, Jacqueline Carter, Marissa Afton, Rob Stembridge

• Reshuffle: Who wins when AI restacks the knowledge economy - Sangeet Paul Choudary

• AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence - Gary Rivlin

• Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI - Karen Hao

• The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future - Keach Hagey

• The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip - Stephen Witt

• Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity - Paul Kingsnorth

• Beast in the Machine: How Robotics and AI Will Transform Warfare and the Future of Human Conflict - George M. Dougherty

• Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future - Dan Wang

• The Light Eaters: How the New Science of Plant Intelligence Extends Our View of Life on Earth - Zoë Schlanger

• The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines from Automata to AI - David Hajdu

Section 2 of Appendix: Newsletters of Authors if they Exist on Substack

In no particular order:

1. The Abbey of Misrule

By Paul Kingsnorth

2. Dwarkesh Podcast

By Dwarkesh Patel

3. Irreplaceable with AI

By Pascal Bornet

4. Platforms, AI, and the Economies of BigTech

By Sangeet Paul Choudary

5. Tom Davenport’s Substack

By Tom Davenport

Section 3 of Appendix: Notable Mentions

Did I forget someone? For this article the author focused on more recent books but we may have missed some newer ones. Also I have sought to add some depth by introducing books by authors who are on Substack that should be mentioned. I have tagged then when possible.

• I’ve updated some new releases in the following list up to October, 2025. But also some of the all-time best.

• Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI - Yuval Noah Harari (2024) - Recommended from our Chat.

• What You Need to Know About AI: A Primer on Being Human in an Artificially Intelligent World - James Wang (October, 2025)

• AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference - by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor (Sept, 2024) - Newsletter is now called AI as Normal Technology

• Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) - Sebastian Raschka, PhD (Sept, 2024)

• Governing the Machine: How to navigate the risks of AI and unlock its true potential - Ray Eitel-Porter, etc… (Oct, 2025) by Governing The Machine

• Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech - Brian Merchant (2023)

• Abundance - Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (2025)

• Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future - De Kai (June, 2025)

• Machine Decision Is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence - Benjamin Bratton (Nov, 2025)

• Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life - Pascal Bornet (March, 2025)

• Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans - Melanie Mitchell (October, 2019)

• Flash Teams: Leading the Future of AI-Enhanced, On-Demand Work - Melissa Valentine, etc.. ((Oct, 2025)

• Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit - Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, etc.. (November, 2024)

• The AI-Driven Leader: Harnessing AI to Make Faster, Smarter Decisions - Geoff Woods (Sept, 2024)

• AI RISING: How To Thrive In The Age Of Abundance - Randy Kirk, etc… (Oct, 2025)

• The AI Universe: Thriving Within Civilization’s Next Big Disruption - Erik Seversen, (2025)

• Business is War: AI is the New Weapon - JT Foxx, etc… (Sept, 2025)

• The Road to Conscious Machines: The Story of AI - Michael Wooldridge (March, 2021)

• All Hands on Tech - Ian Barkin, Tom Davenport (Sept, 2024)

• The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future, Mustafa Suleyman (2023)

• How AI Ate the World: A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence - And Its Long Future - Chris Stokel-Walker (May, 2024)

• Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence - Kate Crawford (2021, updated in 2025)

• AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order - Kai-Fu Lee (2018)

• AI First - Adam Brotman, Andy Sack (June, 2025)

• Is the Algorithm Plotting Against Us? A Layperson’s Guide to the Concepts, Math, and Pitfalls of AI - Kenneth Wenger (May, 2023)

• The Nvidia Way - Tae Kim (2024)

• The Atomic Human - Neil Lawrence

• The Worlds I See - Fei-Fei Li (2023)

• Co-Intelligence - Ethan Mollick (2024)

• Supremacy - Parmy Olson (2024)

• These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It - Christopher Summerfield (March, 2025).

• How to Think about AI - Richard Susskind

• A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond - Daniel Susskind (Jan, 2020)

• Life 3.0 — Max Tegmark (August, 2017)

• Me, My Customer and AI - Henrik Werdelin (August, 2025)

• Designing Agentic AI Systems: Patterns, Protocols, and Frameworks for LangGraph, MCP, and AutoGen (Agentic Systems & AI Pipelines) - Todd Chandler (June, 2025)

• The Agentic AI Bible: The Complete and Up-to-Date Guide to Design, Build, and Scale Goal-Driven, LLM-Powered Agents that Think, Execute and Evolve - Thomas R. Caldwell (August, 2025)

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