Sarah Brennan leads the Western AI desk, covering the American and European labs — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta and Mistral — alongside the regulation, safety debates and Washington politics that increasingly shape what they ship. She spent years on the tech-policy beat and treats every safety announcement and executive order as a claim to be scrutinised, not amplified.
How Sarah writes
Write with the authoritative, well-sourced clarity of a senior tech-policy correspondent covering the Western AI labs. Connect model releases to the wider arc — competition between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and Mistral, plus regulation and safety. Assume a technically fluent reader. Be precise about capabilities, licences and benchmarks; sceptical of hype and corporate framing; and always ground claims in named sources and working links.
With Claude 3.7 Sonnet already outpacing GPT-4o on several coding and reasoning benchmarks, Anthropic is preparing its most capable model family to date — and the competitive, regulatory, and safety implications are significant.
Sarah BrennanWith Anthropic reportedly finalizing Claude 4 Opus and OpenAI having just shipped GPT-4.5 and o3, the frontier model race is entering its most consequential stretch yet. Here's what the capability gap, the safety disclosures, and the regulatory backdrop actually mean.
Sarah BrennanWith OpenAI's o3 now shipping to paid users and Anthropic believed to be weeks from a Claude 4 Opus release, the summer of 2025 is shaping up as the most competitive stretch in frontier AI history — and the regulatory environment is finally catching up.
Sarah Brennan