Kali Hays

Kali Hays is a technology reporter at the BBC whose coverage tracks how artificial intelligence, social media platforms and Big Tech decisions play out in courts, workplaces and government policy. Her work centres on frontier AI firms, landmark social media addiction trials and corporate restructuring as companies integrate AI into products and operations. She treats hardware launches, AI tools and corporate announcements as part of a larger story about legal exposure, regulatory pressure and the changing nature of work.

AI governance and frontier company scrutiny

Hays focuses heavily on the governance of leading AI companies and the safeguards around their systems.

In coverage of Anthropic, she reports on calls for an AI “kill switch” that could be checked by a third party, framing the proposal as a potential mandatory safety mechanism for large AI firms. She follows the same company into its dispute with the US Department of Defense, explaining how a Pentagon risk label on its supply chain prompted threats of legal action and raised questions about how government agencies assess AI vendors. Her reporting on OpenAI examines both product launches and oversight, linking the unveiling of the “dots” assistant to concerns significant enough to delay a new model and to internal investigations into bots that interacted with multiple US government agencies. She extends this strand into cyber security and national policy, covering warnings from leading tech firms that time is running out to secure critical systems and tracking meetings between political leaders and AI executives about investment and regulation.

Across these pieces, she treats AI as an industrial and policy system rather than a series of isolated tools, emphasising how corporate decisions intersect with government scrutiny and security risks.

Landmark social media addiction trials

Another distinct thread in Hays’s work is sustained coverage of social media addiction lawsuits against major platforms. She reports on a landmark trial in which Meta and YouTube are found liable over claims that their services contributed to addiction, tracking how jury decisions and legal findings define platform responsibility.

In follow-up stories from the same proceedings, she relays testimony from a young woman who describes spending her childhood “on Instagram all day”, using those accounts to show how individual experiences are presented to a jury when users sue Meta and Google.

Her reporting includes high-profile defence moments, such as Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance to defend Meta in the same landmark case, detailing how the company argues its position when its practices are challenged in court. She then covers shifts in the litigation landscape, including a teenager dropping a social media addiction lawsuit against Meta, noting how plaintiffs’ choices reshape the trajectory of these cases.

Taken together, these articles show Hays following a single cluster of trials over time, from initial liability findings through testimony, executive defence and case withdrawals, with attention to how legal outcomes affect the wider debate about platform design and youth mental health.

Big Tech restructuring and workplace surveillance

Hays also reports on how AI adoption drives restructuring inside major technology firms and changes how employees are monitored. Her coverage of Meta explains how the company will track workers’ clicks and keystrokes to train AI models, detailing plans to record employee activity such as mouse movements and document interactions to feed internal systems.

She connects this to broader questions about workplace surveillance and the use of employees’ day-to-day behaviour as training data for corporate AI. In pieces on Tesla and Block, she links strategic pivots to robots and AI with cuts to car models and large reductions in headcount.

Her reporting on Block describes plans to lay off almost half the workforce, quoting its co-founder’s view that AI fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.

The Tesla coverage similarly situates product decisions and model line-ups within a shift toward robotics, automation and AI-focused investment. Across these stories she shows how AI is used to justify restructuring, tracking the practical implications for workers, product strategies and corporate messaging.

Corporate power struggles in AI and space

Hays regularly covers high-stakes power struggles among Big Tech and AI leaders, treating lawsuits, mergers and valuations as part of a competitive landscape. In reporting on Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, she explains how the case was lost because he waited too long to sue, highlighting the role of timing and limitation periods when founders challenge former partners. Her coverage of Musk’s SpaceX and xAI merger charts how combining a space firm with an AI company can create one of the world’s most valuable private businesses, focusing on valuation, ownership structure and the strategic rationale for unifying different technology fronts under a single corporate umbrella.

She complements this with broader reporting on OpenAI’s interactions with government agencies and on meetings between national leaders and AI executives, showing how corporate disputes and alliances sit alongside efforts to influence policy.

In consumer-facing coverage of Google’s return to smart glasses after the failure of Google Glass, she ties hardware revivals to reputational risk, earlier product missteps and the company’s wider ambitions in ambient computing. Across these articles, Hays distinguishes herself by treating product launches, lawsuits, mergers and regulatory talks as interlocking elements of a shifting AI and Big Tech power map, rather than as disconnected news items.