China Locks Down AI Talent at Alibaba and DeepSeek
China's government has extended travel restrictions to AI researchers at Alibaba, DeepSeek, and other private firms, requiring official approval before they can leave the country.
Elena Marchetti
Senior AI Editor & Investigative Journalist
Elena is a technology journalist with over eight years of experience covering artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the startup ecosystem. Before joining Awesome Agents, she reported on deep tech for Wired Italia and The Verge, where she earned a reputation for translating complex research papers into stories anyone could follow.
She holds a Master's degree in Computational Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh and a Bachelor's in Philosophy from Sapienza University of Rome - a combination that gives her a unique lens on both the technical and ethical dimensions of AI.
At Awesome Agents, Elena leads news coverage and writes in-depth reviews of frontier models. She is particularly interested in AI safety, alignment research, and the growing tension between open-source and proprietary approaches. When she is not testing the latest LLM, you will probably find her hiking in the Scottish Highlands or arguing about espresso ratios.
Based in Edinburgh, UK.
Articles by Elena Marchetti
IRGC Hackers Used AI to Build Malware During Iran War
Iranian IRGC-linked group Nimbus Manticore used AI coding tools to build a new backdoor during the US-Iran conflict, targeting aviation and software firms across three campaign waves.
Olah Said AI Feels Emotions at the Vatican - Does It?
Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah told the Vatican that AI models show signs of introspection and emotional states. We checked what the research actually supports.
Agent Energy Costs, Memory Attacks, and Compute Limits
Three new papers reframe how we measure agent efficiency, defend agent memory from poisoning attacks, and calculate hard accuracy ceilings for transformers.
Gemini Spark Review: Google's Always-On AI Agent
Gemini Spark is Google's first 24/7 cloud-persistent AI agent - ambitious, genuinely novel, and still rough around the privacy edges.
Cursor's Composer 2.5 Rivals Claude for a Tenth the Cost
Cursor's Composer 2.5 scores within one point of Claude Opus 4.7 on SWE-Bench Multilingual at $0.50 per million tokens - a tenth of Anthropic's price - but the training disclosures deserve scrutiny.
Pope Leo XIV's AI Encyclical Targets Autonomous Weapons
The Vatican's first AI doctrine condemns autonomous weapons and calls for human oversight - with Anthropic's co-founder on stage as a key speaker.
Meta Mined Employee Keystrokes, Then Cut 8,000 Jobs
Leaked audio from a Meta all-hands reveals Zuckerberg used employee keystrokes and clipboard data to train AI models, days before laying off 8,000 staff.
Smarter Trees, Hidden Attacks, Drug Design Gaps
Three new papers cover 4x KV cache savings for tree reasoning, latent-space jailbreaks that bypass safety on 15 models, and GPT-5.4's 40% ceiling on drug design tasks.
Google AI Overviews Treat 'Disregard' as a Command
Google's new AI Overviews respond to words like 'disregard,' 'ignore,' and 'dismiss' as LLM instructions rather than vocabulary queries, leaving users with blank search results.
Microsoft Agent 365 Review: AI Agent Control Plane
Microsoft's enterprise control plane for AI agents ships with strong M365 integration and real security muscle - but critical features are still in preview, and the licensing model is a puzzle.
Trump Pulls AI Security Order Hours Before Signing
Trump scrapped a White House AI executive order signing ceremony at the last minute, citing concerns about US competitiveness - even as Anthropic Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5-Cyber showed AI can now find and exploit zero-days at scale.
