Elena Volkov

Elena Volkov leads MegaOne AI's Spotlight desk, where she reports the stories the broader AI press tends to overlook or under-investigate. Her work focuses on harms, accountability, and the gap between what AI companies promise and what their systems actually do in the wild. Elena's reporting has examined deepfake harassment, opaque content-moderation systems, dataset provenance, internal whistleblower accounts, and the ways regulatory loopholes allow consequential failures to go unaddressed. She approaches each story with the assumption that the public record, FOIA requests, court filings, and direct conversations with affected people will reveal more than corporate communications. Elena is committed to giving subjects of investigations a meaningful opportunity to respond, and to publishing primary documents wherever possible so readers can verify her conclusions. Before joining MegaOne AI, she covered technology and human-rights stories across several investigative newsrooms. Her beat is built on the conviction that the AI industry is too important — and too consequential for too many people — to be covered only as a series of product launches. She publishes when the reporting is solid, not when the news cycle demands it.