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Contributors

The named bylines on this publication. Editorial decisions are made by the people on this page; the operating disclosure governing that work appears on the About page.

Senior Critic

Annika Vogel

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Annika Vogel is the senior critic at Black Box Notes. She covers AI auditability, interpretability, and the regulatory machinery that is slowly forming around opaque production systems. Her background is in the analysis of large-scale software systems in safety-critical industries, with a particular interest in the gap between vendor documentation and the behavior auditors can actually verify.

She joined the publication to write about the difference between AI products that invite inspection and AI products that resist it. She is more interested in the second category. Her current beat covers EU AI Act implementation, frontier-lab interpretability research, and the auditing practices emerging inside large agentic deployments. She is based in Berlin.

Vogel writes the cornerstone essay of each issue and edits the Field Reports column. She does not accept review copies. She does not accept embargoed pitches. She will read your published technical paper if you send it to her.

Staff Analyst

Tomás Esquivel

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Tomás Esquivel is the staff analyst at Black Box Notes. His work focuses on the mechanics of agentic systems in production: how they are deployed, how they fail, how operators try to surface what they have done, and what an auditor can actually do with the audit logs they produce.

Esquivel approaches AI auditability the way a working systems engineer approaches it. He is interested in the difference between observability that has been engineered in and observability that has been added on after a regulator's letter. He is unenthused by claims that cannot be operationalised. He is based between Mexico City and Lisbon.

Esquivel writes the publication's practitioner-facing pieces and the Conversations interview series. He is reachable through the editorial inbox.

Editorial Team

Black Box Notes Editorial

The Editorial Team byline is used for short notes, listicles, the publication's Regulation Watch column, and the Corrections column. It collects the work of standing contributors who do not yet have a named beat on the publication, plus the editor's-desk pieces that are too short for a byline of their own.

The Editorial Team is responsible for the publication's standing departments and for the operating quality of the site as a whole. Editorial Team pieces are read and signed off by either Vogel or Esquivel before they run; the byline reflects joint authorship rather than anonymity.

Standing contributors writing under the Editorial Team byline include legal-tech analysts, retired enterprise auditors, and one independent interpretability researcher whose other affiliations preclude a named byline. Their work is collectively edited.

A note on pseudonymity

Black Box Notes occasionally publishes pieces by contributors who write under their own names but cannot disclose specific employers. When this happens, we say so in the byline block and we tell the reader why. We do not run pieces by writers whose identity is unknown to us.