Europe torched its own rulebook to please business, and business is still unhappy
Europe torched its own rulebook to please business, and business is still unhappy

Twenty months into the EU’s campaign to slash red tape, many of the businesses that demanded it are unimpressed. Firms told Politico the “simplification” drive is too slow, too costly, and too complicated. Politico spoke to 17 companies, consultancies,…

A US senator has a plan to make AI answer for its harms. It starts with your local data centre
A US senator has a plan to make AI answer for its harms. It starts with your local data centre

The fight over AI’s harms has played out state by state. One US senator wants to make it federal, all at once. Ed Markey has a long list of worries about artificial intelligence. Thirsty data centres. Workplace surveillance. Biased algorithms. Chatbots…

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…

Malaysia’s PM is sending an autonomous AI double out to serve citizens, payment links and all
Malaysia’s PM is sending an autonomous AI double out to serve citizens, payment links and all

Malaysia’s prime minister is trying something new: sending an autonomous copy of himself out to serve the public. Anwar Ibrahim is preparing to launch an artificial intelligence version of himself. The avatar is called PMX AI, a nod to his place as Mal…

UK shops are about to get a four-second line to the police, powered by your face
UK shops are about to get a four-second line to the police, powered by your face

Walk into a shop with the wrong face on file, and the police could know within four seconds. That is the pitch, and the problem. A facial recognition system in more than 100 UK shops is about to start calling the police in real time. It will fire the m…

The UK just declared Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Oracle ‘critical’ to its financial system
The UK just declared Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Oracle ‘critical’ to its financial system

Britain’s banks run on four American clouds. The Treasury reckons two-thirds of UK firms lean on the same handful. Now the regulators are stepping in. The UK has named Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Oracle as “critical third parties” to its financial sy…

The Singapore side door: OpenAI and Google are selling frontier AI to blacklisted Chinese giants
The Singapore side door: OpenAI and Google are selling frontier AI to blacklisted Chinese giants

Three Chinese tech giants are on a US military blacklist. All three can still buy America’s best AI, as long as they buy it in the right country. Three of China’s biggest technology companies sit on a US military blacklist. All three can still reach so…

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…