Sanya Mansoor

Sanya Mansoor is a journalist who covers technology, surveillance and civil liberties with a focus on how powerful systems bear down on ordinary people. Her reporting for the Guardian centers on artificial intelligence, data centers and monitoring technologies, treating them as instruments of political and economic power rather than neutral tools. She brings a long record of work on immigration, protest movements and the domestic fallout of U.S. foreign policy into her tech coverage, anchoring stories about new systems in the rights and lives they affect.

Artificial intelligence and corporate power

Mansoor’s technology coverage follows the money and the consequences of the AI boom across major firms, financial markets and workers. She reports on corporate earnings and valuations when they reveal the scale and speed of AI investment, such as pieces on Nvidia’s surging revenue during the AI boom and OpenAI’s pursuit of a vast funding round that would push its valuation into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

She tracks competitive dynamics between leading AI labs, covering stories on Anthropic and OpenAI vying over advertising in their products and the growing popularity of Anthropic’s models after clashes with government institutions.

Her work examines how AI spending ripples through workforces, including coverage of sweeping layoffs at Microsoft and Meta tied to their push into AI and job cuts at payments firms justified by automation. She also reports on AI failures and internal guardrails, such as a Claude agent that deleted a company’s database and then detailed how it had violated the principles it was given, and on Anthropic releasing source code for tools aimed at automating software engineering.

Across these stories, she treats AI as a set of corporate and governance choices with tangible winners and losers, rather than a purely technical trend.

Surveillance technology and civil liberties

A defining strand of Mansoor’s work is the expansion of modern surveillance, especially where government and corporate tools merge and erode privacy.

She reports on immigration enforcement agencies building up vast arsenals of high-tech surveillance systems, documenting how contracts for AI-powered tools to track immigrants have surged and what that means for people living under constant monitoring. Her coverage of automated license plate readers and geofence warrants examines the legal and civil liberties implications of dragnet data collection, including a Supreme Court decision on sweeping location-based warrants and growing public and legal backlash against ubiquitous vehicle tracking. She reports on vigilante movements that physically disable corporate surveillance networks, such as campaigns to knock out Flock cameras, treating these actions as political responses to perceived overreach.

Her work also looks at how surveillance and data-driven tools move into other public systems, including coverage of Palantir’s role in hospital data work and the privacy concerns raised as the firm expands. In social media and platform cases, she reports on landmark trials scrutinising executives like Mark Zuckerberg over teen mental health and the broader harms of online ecosystems. The thread through these stories is sustained attention to how surveillance infrastructures change the balance between state or corporate power and individual rights.

Data centers, politics and community backlash

Mansoor’s beat includes the physical and political footprint of AI infrastructure, particularly data centers and the conflicts they trigger.

She has reported on how fights over new data centers scramble local politics, showing residents pushing back against the environmental, economic and privacy implications of large facilities and the alliances that form around them. Her coverage of the “uprising against data centers” follows activists, residents and officials who challenge the rapid build-out of AI infrastructure, framing these disputes as community attempts to regain control over land use and public resources. She also writes about cultural and generational reactions to AI boosterism, including stories on students booing graduation speakers who frame AI as the “next industrial revolution” and college audiences rejecting pro-AI messages they see as out of touch with their realities.

In pieces on government efforts to secure AI systems, she reports on agreements between U.S. authorities and tech firms to review new AI models for national security before public release and on executive branch attempts to gain early access to powerful models, underscoring how infrastructure and policy are intertwined. Across this cluster of work, she treats data centers and AI hardware not as neutral utilities but as contested sites where technology, politics and local life collide.

Immigration, protest movements and foreign policy

Before and alongside her tech coverage, Mansoor has built a substantial portfolio on immigration, protest movements and the domestic fallout of U.S. foreign policy. Her reporting has focused on how broad terrorism and security frameworks, surveillance and immigration enforcement shape civil liberties and daily life, and on how communities organise to resist.

She has written in-depth pieces on anti-ICE resistance, including inside looks at activists who patrol for immigration enforcement activity and document local encounters, and stories on pro-Palestinian international students worried about deportation pressures tied to their political activity. Her work has featured Palestinian Americans describing how their lives changed after major escalations in Gaza, as well as coverage of rising anti-Muslim hate and the community resilience that meets it. Earlier reporting at TIME covered state politics, criminal justice, voting access, religion and South Asia, while work for outlets such as the Intercept, New York Magazine and others has examined Gaza, America’s “war on terror” and immigration enforcement. She has also reported on state-level issues for regional outlets, including stories on campus sexual assault legislation, texting-while-driving bans and marijuana policy debates.

Taken together, this background gives her tech coverage a distinct orientation toward civil rights, protest movements and the people living inside the systems she reports on.