AJ Dellinger

AJ Dellinger covers how contemporary technologies - especially artificial intelligence and surveillance tools - reshape power, labor, and everyday life, with a sharp focus on the people and institutions behind them. He is a contributor to Gizmodo, where his reporting on the tech industry and its spillover into politics, policy, and culture combines close tracking of AI companies with scrutiny of the systems they build. He has more than a decade of experience as a writer, reporter, and editor covering the tech industry and its many tentacles that touch people’s lives.

Artificial intelligence as industry and ideology

Dellinger’s core beat at Gizmodo is artificial intelligence and the companies racing to build and deploy it.

His archive is dense with stories on OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google’s Gemini models, and a churn of new agents and model releases that set the pace for the AI industry. He writes about everything from “always-on” AI assistants and text-to-order agents to major model launches branded as the start of an “AGI era,” treating them as products of corporate strategy rather than neutral innovations.

Across these pieces he foregrounds power and hype, examining executives’ rhetoric, investor expectations, and the economic fantasies attached to model development. Headlines follow CEOs calling for AI slowdowns that catch employees off guard, claims that an AI company’s potential revenue rivals an entire national economy, and grand visions of AI reshaping work that sit alongside stories of overworked lab employees. In work on AI bubbles and pricing, he points to compute limits, model costs, and the fragility of AI apps, making the business realities central to the narrative.

Labor and class are recurring threads in his AI coverage, including pieces on AI taking jobs, the “jobpocalypse” pipeline into payday apps, and stories in which AI agents and automation collide with workers’ rights and organizing. In coverage of AI agents and class politics, he treats automation as part of a broader struggle over who benefits from technological progress and who bears its risks.

His reporting consistently ties model capabilities and industry claims back to human consequences, whether in workplaces, creative industries, or the basic trust people place in emerging systems.

Surveillance, data centers, and the infrastructure of control

Dellinger devotes significant attention to surveillance technologies and the physical infrastructure that underpins modern computing.

He writes repeatedly about Flock camera systems, detailing how they misidentify license plates, are pitched to turn drivers into mobile informants, and test how much surveillance the public will accept. These stories treat cameras not as neutral hardware but as tools that shape policing, privacy, and community norms.

Data centers and cloud infrastructure appear as another backbone of his work. He covers backlash against data center projects, public hearings where company representatives face intense criticism, and political efforts to court or resist new facilities. In reporting on satellite images suggesting damage to major cloud providers’ data centers and on politicians pitching data centers to skeptical audiences, he situates these facilities as contested sites of power and risk.

Dellinger also tracks how consumer services quietly build detailed records about users, with stories on fast-food loyalty systems, delivery platforms, and other everyday tools that accumulate data exceeding what many expect. Privacy and security reporting around government use of ad trackers, law enforcement’s cross-border surveillance, and new ways to undermine or evade camera systems extends the theme, highlighting how infrastructure and data practices can narrow or expand the space for individual autonomy.

Tech policy, politics, and corporate influence

A second major strand of Dellinger’s beat follows the intersection of technology with policy and politics. He reports on state and federal actions against major platforms and services, including lawsuits over data collection from minors and efforts to constrain or reshape large entertainment and ticketing firms.

These stories focus on how governments respond to corporate behavior and where enforcement falls short.

His coverage of AI-related policy debates includes age verification campaigns for online services, AI safety frameworks from the executive branch, and attempts to reclassify gig workers such as delivery drivers. In these pieces he follows both advocacy groups and corporate backers, detailing who is pushing for new rules and who stands to gain from them.

Headlines on AI training data firms buying workplace output, and on policymakers using AI systems in sensitive contexts such as healthcare, underscore his interest in how regulation lags behind deployment.

Dellinger often situates tech policy within partisan and ideological conflicts.

He writes about politicians bending mapping tools to nationalist narratives, trade and technology decisions affecting foreign companies, and political figures using data centers and AI as talking points in broader economic agendas. Across this work, tech is treated as a lever for power - shaped by lobbying, media, and electoral incentives - rather than a neutral backdrop.

Culture, internet, and the human impact of tech

Beyond policy and infrastructure, Dellinger writes extensively about the cultural footprint of technology and the internet. His pieces on tech CEOs as favored movie villains, on media figures entangled with tech companies, and on high-profile documentaries being shelved show how corporate and political stories bleed into entertainment and public perception. He also covers social media and influencer ecosystems, including politicians who trade clout as a form of currency and the shifting dynamics between platforms and their most visible users.

Earlier reporting includes stories on major hacks and account breaches, political propagandists removed from platforms, and high-profile outages tied to ransom demands.

These pieces track the tangible fallout of security failures and content moderation decisions, keeping attention on the people whose information and expression are at stake. Across internet and culture coverage, he often uses sharp headlines and a wry tone to puncture corporate narratives while keeping the focus on consequences, not spectacle.

Dellinger’s own description of his work stresses demystifying technology, treating founders and businesses as fallible, and centering humans in every story. He writes that he aims to distill technical topics for a general audience, highlight how systems fail people, pull back the curtain on what happens behind the scenes, and pursue stories that can drive change. That ethos is visible across his Gizmodo work, where complex AI and infrastructure topics are framed through human stakes, institutional accountability, and the everyday realities of living inside a technology-saturated world.