France moves a step closer to banning under-15s from social media
France moves a step closer to banning under-15s from social media

Update | 21 July 2026, final vote French lawmakers gave the bill its final parliamentary approval on Tuesday, with the National Assembly adopting the compromise text the joint committee had agreed a day earlier. Under French procedure the Assembly has …

EVs outsold petrol and diesel in Germany for the first time. The birthplace of the car just changed its fuel.
EVs outsold petrol and diesel in Germany for the first time. The birthplace of the car just changed its fuel.

Electric cars outsold every other fuel type in Germany for the first time in June. The country’s Federal Motor Transport Authority recorded 84,057 new EV registrations, a 78.2% year-on-year increase, putting battery-electric vehicles at 28.4% market sh…

A $400M nonprofit backed by France and DeepMind is building AI’s ‘public option’
A $400M nonprofit backed by France and DeepMind is building AI’s ‘public option’

A farmer in rural India photographs a dying plant and wants to look it up. She does not speak English, and today’s AI barely speaks hers. A nonprofit called Current AI thinks that is a problem worth fixing. Its goal is grand: a “public option” for AI, …

The European Parliament is building its own AI to stop MEPs pasting draft laws into ChatGPT
The European Parliament is building its own AI to stop MEPs pasting draft laws into ChatGPT

The European Parliament has a problem with AI, and its answer is more AI. Lawmakers keep using public chatbots to help write legislation. So the institution is building a sanctioned platform to bring that habit under control. The internal tool, called …

A British AI lab signed up Nvidia, Meta and Samsung to invent materials that don’t exist yet
A British AI lab signed up Nvidia, Meta and Samsung to invent materials that don’t exist yet

A two-year-old British AI lab wants to build the search engine for materials that do not exist yet. On Monday it gathered an unusual crowd to help. Cambridge-based CuspAI launched the AI Materials Foundry, a coalition of more than 45 companies and rese…

The EU just fined AliExpress €550M, its biggest DSA penalty yet
The EU just fined AliExpress €550M, its biggest DSA penalty yet

Alibaba’s AliExpress has been hit with a €550 million ($629 million) fine from the European Union. Brussels says the Chinese shopping platform failed to keep illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products off its site. The penalty, announced on Monday, is th…

Spanish satellite startup Sateliot wants €150 million to beam 5G directly to smartphones from orbit
Spanish satellite startup Sateliot wants €150 million to beam 5G directly to smartphones from orbit

Sateliot, a Barcelona-based satellite startup, is seeking to raise up to €150 million ($172 million), a 50% increase from the €100 million round it announced in April. The company operates a network of low-Earth orbit satellites and plans to use the fu…

ASML will give every employee a €20,000 bonus as AI demand drives record sales
ASML will give every employee a €20,000 bonus as AI demand drives record sales

ASML will give all employees globally a one-time €20,000 ($22,862) share award, the company confirmed on Friday. The bonus vests on January 1, 2030, for staff who remain with the company for the entire period. About 45,000 people work at Europe’s most …

Airbus is moving its most critical apps off AWS to a French cloud
Airbus is moving its most critical apps off AWS to a French cloud

Airbus is pulling some of its most sensitive systems off Amazon Web Services and onto a European cloud. The aerospace group has picked French provider Scaleway to host them, Scaleway said. The move covers the applications Airbus needs to keep running a…

DeepMind’s Hassabis says a STEM degree makes you 10x better with AI
DeepMind’s Hassabis says a STEM degree makes you 10x better with AI

AI is reshaping tech careers. But it will not kill off the value of a STEM degree, according to Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis. He made the comments at a London business conference, in a video published on Wednesday. Knowing the fundamentals of s…