Ashley Belanger
Ashley Belanger follows how emerging technology policies reshape daily life, focusing on AI infrastructure, Big Tech power, online platforms, and automated systems. She is a senior policy reporter at Ars Technica with 20 years of reporting experience. Her coverage treats the automotive sector as one part of a broader story about AI, safety, and legal accountability, rather than a standalone industry beat.
AI infrastructure, data centers, and local backlash
Belanger’s most distinctive work traces the growth of AI data centers and the friction they create in towns facing pollution, noise, and resource strain. She has covered Amazon’s $1 billion plan to ease data center backlash, highlighting how corporate commitments can still trigger criticism over air and water impacts.
A cluster of her stories follows protests and permitting fights that have blocked or reshaped hundreds of billions of dollars in data center projects, from moratoria on new construction to partial cancellations under sustained community pressure. She reports closely on enforcement, documenting cases where regulators fine operators after drone or satellite imagery exposes unpermitted gas generators and other violations.
Across this coverage she repeatedly foregrounds neighbors, local officials, and civil rights groups, treating data centers as a public health and democracy issue as much as an engineering one.
AI governance, Big Tech legal fights, and media impacts
Belanger also reports on AI governance at the national and international level, zeroing in on how political choices shape technical safeguards. Her pieces on US plans to manage AI risks explain how voluntary safety audits and best-practice meetings between major firms leave key obligations unenforced and some experts sidelined.
She examines the geopolitical frame of an “AI race” with China, showing how rivalry rhetoric can complicate proposals for shared safety alert systems and undermine trust-building efforts. Another strand of her reporting draws on court filings and internal emails from Microsoft and OpenAI, detailing how executives themselves describe AI scraping of news as “the largest theft of labor in human history” and an existential threat to publishers. In these stories she connects AI policy debates to the future of independent media, asking what happens when the same systems that power search and assistants cannibalize the business models that sustain reporting.
Online platforms, content harms, and emerging AI gadgets
Belanger’s coverage of platforms and consumer AI devices focuses on privacy, harassment, and the difficulty of enforcing guardrails at scale. She reports on Meta’s AI glasses and companion apps, from software that lets users build interactive “gizmos” to changes intended to curb nonconsensual recording, pairing technical descriptions with the lived experience of people who suddenly find themselves constantly filmed.
Her work on Meta’s privileged AI assistant and associated vulnerabilities explains how relatively simple exploits can fully compromise an agent, raising fresh questions about what counts as “secure” in AI consumer products. In other articles she documents how ads for apps that nudify teens’ photos were allowed to spread on major platforms, and how EU regulation forces companies like Meta to revisit recommendation and moderation systems.
She extends this focus to social networks more broadly, following researchers who study online hate and continue scrutinizing X even under threat of deportation, underscoring the personal risk required to probe platform harms.
Investigative science, social policy, and automated systems
Belanger’s broader investigative background helps explain the way she approaches technology stories today.
Her professional bio describes her as an investigative science journalist tracking how science informs social policy, with recent interest in AI’s social impacts and Big Tech legal battles. Selected work outside Ars Technica includes deep reporting on domestic and sexual violence, child marriage, and school shootings, in which she connects public health studies and legal frameworks to survivors’ experiences and policy failures. She has written on topics such as financial abuse portrayed in popular culture, the disappearance and return of regional wildlife, and the shadow pandemic of domestic violence during COVID outbreaks, always tying scientific or policy details back to individual lives.
At Ars Technica, this lens carries over into stories on AI “tarpits” built to trap scrapers, copyright disputes around AI-generated art, and the real-world consequences of ChatGPT hallucinations, as well as coverage of Tesla’s Autopilot crash litigation and sales performance around vehicles like Cybertruck. Across automotive, AI, and social policy stories, her reporting is distinguished by a consistent effort to show who is affected, how systems fail, and which levers of law and technology might change the outcome.
4 more automobile journalists.
Aarian Marshall
Aarian Marshall is a staff writer at WIRED who stands out for covering how cars, software, and policy collide. She writes on transportation systems and cities, from the auto industry to broader mobility systems. Before WIRED, she reported on cities and urban policy for The Atlantic’s CityLab. Her beat runs from electric vehicles, fuel prices, tariffs, and car-buying decisions to autonomous vehicles, robotaxis, and software-defined cars. She reports with a systems view, linking policy shifts, technical failures, and urban life to what happens on streets, in repair shops, and at the pump.
Abby Smith
Abby Smith’s most distinctive work combines motorsports coverage with live digital and radio reporting. She is Digital Director at KRDO13 and covers the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, including race updates, weather shifts, breaking developments and ways to follow the action. Her beat also includes automotive news, crime, public safety, politics, city government and community life. Notable work includes coverage of homicide arrests, a major drug bust, a presidential address about the war with Iran, a family’s effort to bring Stephen Hubbard home, a state governor candidate and a city security ordinance. She also reports on fitness, school spirit and station staff. Smith writes in a concise, factual style shaped by investigative documentary experience. She turns live events, official announcements and daily developments into clear coverage across digital and radio platforms.
Adele Peters
Adele Peters covers climate solutions and other structural problems as design and policy questions, focusing on what can work in practice. She is a senior writer at Fast Company, where she reports on energy, transportation, housing, materials, agriculture, corporate sustainability, and social impact. Her stories examine climate technologies, grid resilience, electric vehicles, renewable energy, modular construction, homelessness, affordable housing, compostable materials, regenerative agriculture, and ecosystem restoration. She looks at whether projects can scale, their real-world constraints, and their measurable effects. She interviews political and philanthropic leaders, startup founders, and climate tech entrepreneurs, anchoring stories in what is being built and tested. She has written more than 3,000 stories and contributed to Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century and State of Housing Design 2023.
Adrian Leung
Adrian Leung writes engineering-led coverage of Chinese electric vehicles and performance cars for CarNewsChina. He focuses on new energy vehicles, battery systems, powertrains, electric platforms, high-end domestic brands, and track-ready models, and he explains technical details in plain language for non-specialist readers. His reporting treats new models as hardware and systems stories, with precise figures on range, battery capacity, chassis layout, motor outputs, weight, and acceleration. He also covers the Chinese auto industry’s finances and technology roadmap, including sector profits, vehicle volumes, and solid-state battery timelines. His background in Electrical and Computer Engineering shows in the way he writes about vehicle electronics and battery management.