Britain is spending £2bn to train its army inside an AI war simulation
Britain is spending £2bn to train its army inside an AI war simulation

Britain is spending £2bn to train its army inside a simulation. It has handed the job to an American defence giant, with a German one taking a slice. The UK has signed a £2bn ($2.7bn) contract to train its soldiers with artificial intelligence. The dea…

Big Tech’s AI debt just hit $350bn, and Europe is about to feel it
Big Tech’s AI debt just hit $350bn, and Europe is about to feel it

Big Tech built its reputation on mountains of cash. It is building its AI empire on debt, and the bill is starting to land in Europe. The five biggest builders of AI data centres in the US have doubled their debt over five years. Together, Alphabet, Am…

From powerboat records to a $1bn war chest: meet Europe’s newest defence unicorn
From powerboat records to a $1bn war chest: meet Europe’s newest defence unicorn

First the Royal Navy shoved a robot boat out of a transport plane at 1,300 feet. Then its maker became Europe’s newest defence unicorn. Kraken Technology Group, a British maker of uncrewed surface vessels, has raised $175m (€152.9m) in a Series B round…

EU tells Meta to dismantle Facebook and Instagram’s ‘addictive’ design or face a fine
EU tells Meta to dismantle Facebook and Instagram’s ‘addictive’ design or face a fine

Brussels has decided that infinite scroll is not a feature but a hazard. On Friday, the European Commission told Meta to dismantle the design tricks that keep people glued to Facebook and Instagram, or risk a fine that could run into billions, in a fre…

The US wants to delete the steering wheel. The EU wants a camera on your face
The US wants to delete the steering wheel. The EU wants a camera on your face

This week, two of the world’s biggest car regulators looked at the same question and reached opposite answers. The question is simple. What should sit between a human and a moving vehicle? In the United States, the top auto-safety official floated pull…

A €91M bet on the diamond microscope that could be Europe’s next ASML
A €91M bet on the diamond microscope that could be Europe’s next ASML

Europe uses about a fifth of the world’s chips, but makes only a tenth of them. A three-year-old Munich startup thinks it can help close that gap, and Brussels has just backed the bet. QuantumDiamonds is a spin-out of the Technical University of Munich…

Dutch watchdogs urge Europe’s banks to pool buying power against US tech giants
Dutch watchdogs urge Europe’s banks to pool buying power against US tech giants

A single European bank haggling with Amazon or Microsoft has almost no leverage. A few hundred of them haggling together might. That, stripped to its essence, is the recommendation Dutch regulators handed their government on Friday, in a report warning…

SAP averts an EU antitrust fine by opening up its support market
SAP averts an EU antitrust fine by opening up its support market

SAP has talked its way out of an EU antitrust fine. The European Commission said it would accept a set of commitments from the German software group, closing an investigation into how SAP handles maintenance and support for its on-premise enterprise so…

EU Parliament revives a ‘zombie’ child-abuse scanning bill it rejected in March
EU Parliament revives a ‘zombie’ child-abuse scanning bill it rejected in March

The European Parliament has voted to advance a bill letting tech companies legally scan for child sexual abuse material. On Thursday in Strasbourg, lawmakers sent the proposal to EU member states for approval, Politico reports. The twist is that Parlia…

A four-year-old has seen more of the world than ChatGPT. Yann LeCun is betting $1bn on that
A four-year-old has seen more of the world than ChatGPT. Yann LeCun is betting $1bn on that

Yann LeCun is not a natural contrarian, but he is playing one right now. The man often called a godfather of AI built the convolutional neural network in the late 1980s. That design still powers phone cameras, medical scans, and driver-assistance syste…