OpenAI announced plans for its Stargate program, a global data center initiative valued at $500bn, to be established in the UK, specifically at Cobalt Park on Tyneside. The project aimed to house around 8,000 Nvidia AI processors by the first quarter of 2026, but that deadline has now passed without any construction starting.
The new checks, part of the EU's new Entry/Exit System (EES), collect digital personal records of third country nationals travelling to the Schengen area and replace the manual stamping of passports.
Companies across sectors such as banking, industry, and technology report that their digital infrastructure is closely intertwined with American software and cloud platforms. Many organizations rely on services from large American suppliers for office software, cloud storage, and AI applications. According to them, this dependence cannot be reduced quickly without operational disruptions.
Anthropic's political activities have ramped up as the company continues to be enmeshed in a nasty legal battle with the Defense Department. The dispute erupted earlier this year over the government's use of Anthropic's AI models and what guidelines (if any) should exist for that usage.
Traditionally, statistics show that most users will trust what they see at the top of a search page. They don't generally question it. That sort of placement alone can give a company a significant advantage, as it can greatly influence and help shape user behavior on a large scale.
The groups complain about "the increasing concentration of power and lack of alternatives in digital markets, the push for deregulation, and the urgent need to enforce digital laws to protect our fundamental rights and create a level playing field for competition and innovation."
"With this law, we are implementing European requirements in a maximally innovation-friendly way and creating lean AI supervision with a clear focus on the needs of the economy," Federal Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger said in a statement.
The European Parliament has taken a rare and telling step: it has disabled built-in artificial intelligence features on work devices used by lawmakers and staff, citing unresolved concerns about data security, privacy, and the opaque nature of cloud-based AI processing. The decision, communicated to Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in an internal memo this week, reflects a deepening unease at the heart of European institutions about how AI systems handle sensitive data.
The Irish Data Protection Commission said Tuesdaythat it had opened an inquiry into Elon Musk's X, formerly known as Twitter. The commission said in a press release that the inquiry was linked to the creation and publication of non-consensual, sexualized images of European Union residents on X using Grok's generative AI functions. This included pictures of children. The commission, which is responsible for enforcing the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, said in the release that it notified X of the investigation on Monday.
