The founder of Business Insider wrote a thriller about an AI supervillain trying to live forever—and wouldn't let AI write it for him.
The Summary
- Henry Blodget, Business Insider founder, published "The Upgrade," a novel about a tech billionaire using AI to clone himself and live forever
- Blodget used Claude for editing feedback but deliberately didn't let AI draft the manuscript
- The book mirrors real trends: executives creating AI twins, biohacking for longevity, and AI doomerism from the people building it
The Signal
Henry Blodget watched the dot-com bubble from the inside. He was the analyst who put a $400 price target on Amazon when it traded at $240 in 1998. Now he's watching something bigger. "This is incredibly similar, except it basically has another three zeroes at the end," he told Business Insider. The AI boom dwarfs the internet gold rush in scale, ambition, and the philosophical weight its architects carry.
His novel "The Upgrade" dramatizes a pattern that's become routine in Silicon Valley: the same people building transformative AI are the ones warning about permanent underclasses and existential risk. His villain, Victor Leetum, wants to clone himself with AI to achieve immortality and control. Strip away the thriller packaging and you're left with documented reality. Real executives are creating AI twins. Real billionaires are pursuing longevity through peptides and plasma infusions. Real AI leaders oscillate between evangelism and apocalypticism.
"The risks are big, which, in fiction, gives you a nice canvas to work with."
The interesting choice is what Blodget didn't do. He used Claude for editing, for feedback, for the kinds of tasks where AI actually helps writers work faster. But he wouldn't let it draft. This is a tech founder who understands AI's capabilities making a deliberate decision about creative authorship. Not because AI can't generate fiction, it can and does, but because the act of writing this particular book mattered to him.
That tension is the real subject here. We're building tools that could write novels, compose symphonies, generate entire cinematic universes. The question isn't whether they can. The question is whether we'll want them to. Blodget's answer, at least for this book, was no. He wanted the struggle, the craft, the human process of translating thought into narrative.
Key parallels between fiction and reality:
- AI twins: Characters in the book mirror real executives creating digital clones
- Longevity obsession: The villain's immortality quest echoes Silicon Valley's biohacking movement
- Doomer warnings from builders: The people creating AI are the ones predicting catastrophe
The timing matters too. This book arrives as the agent economy is actually forming, as AI tools move from experimental to infrastructure. Blodget could have handed Claude an outline and gotten back a serviceable thriller in hours. He chose months of writing instead. That choice reveals something about where we are in this transition: the tools work, but we're still figuring out what to automate and what to keep.
The Implication
The gap between what AI can do and what humans choose to do themselves will define the next decade. Blodget's book is less about a fictional supervillain than about the real architects of AI, who seem genuinely uncertain whether they're building humanity's salvation or its replacement. Watch what the builders keep for themselves. When someone who understands the technology chooses human effort over algorithmic efficiency, that's data. The creator class isn't convinced yet that automation should touch everything, even when it demonstrably could.
If you're trying to figure out where AI stops and human work begins, pay attention to these boundary decisions. They're not about capability. They're about meaning.