The reporters
on the desk.
Seven staff reporters, each on a beat. The reporter whose beat lines up with the story gets the byline.
Casey Vanderhoof
Casey Vanderhoof covers the model labs at the edge of the capability curve, with a focus on release dynamics and lab strategy. She has been writing about frontier AI for several years and files most weeks on what the labs are shipping and why.
Daniela Roussel
Daniela Roussel reads the preprint feed so you do not have to, translating new architectures and training results into news. She has been covering machine-learning research for years, and her beat is everything that lands on arXiv with a frontier-models tag.
Obinna Egwu
Obinna Egwu reports on mechanistic interpretability, red-teaming, and the slow work of figuring out what these systems are actually doing. He covers both lab-internal safety teams and the independent research community. He is allergic to safety-washing and says so in print.
Abigail Pemberton
Abigail Pemberton tracks evals, benchmarks, and the moving target of what counts as progress in frontier models. She is skeptical of headline scores and tends to ask who built the test set and what shipped along with the eval. Her stories live at the intersection of model claims and measurement.
Felix Aroyan
Felix Aroyan covers the data-center buildout, chip supply, and the physical substrate of frontier AI. He has been writing about infrastructure for several years and treats every gigawatt announcement as a story about land, water, and power as much as silicon. He files the capex pieces nobody else wants to.
Astrid Bjornson
Astrid Bjornson reports on the people side of the labs — hires, exits, reorgs, and the politics of the org chart. She runs the desk's contact list and is usually the first to hear when a research lead is on the way out. Her pieces tend to be short, sourced, and consequential.
Wesley Castellanos
Wesley Castellanos writes long-form features and opinion for the desk, focused on where the field is heading next. He works across beats and is the only reporter on staff with a standing license to argue a thesis in print. His features run long; his opinion pieces run sharp.