Kali Hays

Kali Hays reports on how major technology companies are held to account for safety, legal and political risks around artificial intelligence, social media and automated driving. She is a technology reporter for the BBC, with a focus on US technology firms and the rules, lawsuits and investigations that surround them. Her work follows stories from corporate decisions through to courtrooms and regulators, showing how product choices and business models turn into public scrutiny and legal pressure.

AI companies, markets and control

Hays covers the business and governance of leading AI firms, especially Anthropic and OpenAI.

She reports on Anthropic’s plans to list its shares in the US as its valuation climbs, explaining how the company’s growth fits into the wider market for AI services and investments. She also tracks when Anthropic pushes back against government decisions, including its vow to sue the Pentagon over a supply chain risk label it argues is unfair and damaging.

Her coverage extends to safety and control mechanisms, such as calls for an AI “kill switch” that a third party could check, and the case for making such controls mandatory for companies building powerful models. In joint reporting with colleagues, she highlights warnings from major firms, including Google, Microsoft and Anthropic, that cyber defences must improve before AI systems become strong enough to override them, framing AI as both a tool and a threat to critical infrastructure. Through these pieces she treats AI not just as a feature of new products but as an industry whose growth is constrained by legal, security and ethical guardrails.

Courts, regulators and the social media business

Hays regularly reports on how social media platforms face legal action and regulatory settlements over harms to young users.

She covers landmark jury trials where Meta and YouTube are found liable in a social media addiction case, detailing how jurors concluded that the companies intentionally built addictive products that damaged a young woman’s mental health. In related reporting, she follows the same trial from the perspective of the plaintiff’s testimony, describing how her childhood was dominated by near-constant use of Instagram and YouTube and how that experience is now being examined in court.

Hays also documents a sweeping settlement in which Meta agrees to pay up to $18bn to resolve claims that Facebook and Instagram harmed children, breaking down the financial scale of the deal and the product changes demanded for teen users. Across these stories she shows how business choices - such as engagement-driven design and time-on-platform incentives - translate into legal exposure, large financial penalties and new constraints on how social apps can treat younger users.

Tesla, automation and crash scrutiny

Another strand of Hays’s work follows Tesla as it shifts strategy and faces questions over safety and automation.

She reports on a fatal crash in Texas where a Tesla drove off the road into a home, killing a woman inside, and on the decision by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to open a special crash investigation into the incident. Her piece sets out key facts from local police, including the driver’s claim that the vehicle was using an automated driving assistance system, and explains how federal investigators handle complex collisions involving advanced driver-assistance features. In broader coverage, she reports on Tesla cutting car models as the company moves more decisively towards robots and AI, tying product changes to longer-term bets on automation and new revenue streams. Taken together, these stories show her focus on the intersection of corporate strategy and safety oversight, especially where automation blurs the line between human and machine control.

Consumer devices, pricing and privacy

Hays also covers how consumer technology affects people’s wallets and privacy. She reports on concerns over smart glasses and other wearable devices, explaining how a new wave of products raises fresh questions about data collection in everyday life and why some models draw more scrutiny than others. In joint reporting on price changes, she covers Apple increasing some prices by nearly 20% and Xbox raising costs at the same time, setting these moves in the context of competition and subscription-based business models. These pieces show her interest in how product design, pricing and data practices shape the experience of ordinary users, not just investors or policymakers.

Live coverage and ongoing AI scrutiny

Beyond individual articles, Hays contributes to live coverage of major AI events and public conversations with industry leaders.

In live reporting from an OpenAI event featuring Sam Altman, she relays remarks that people are “right to be afraid of AI,” highlighting how leading figures themselves frame the risks of their own technology. Her involvement in these rolling updates fits with her broader beat: tracking how AI’s rapid development prompts real-time reactions from companies, courts and regulators.