by Raphael Dudler | Jul 7, 2026 | gafam watch
OpenAI has proposed handing the US government a 5% equity stake — worth roughly $42.6 billion — through a vehicle modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund, and wants Anthropic, Google and Meta to cede matching stakes. It remains a proposal, not a deal: rivals haven’t agreed, Congress hasn’t acted, and Reuters could not independently verify it. But if any version proceeds, it rewires every future AI fight — because a government that owns AI companies cannot regulate them impartially. gafam.ai reads what state ownership of AI means for Europe.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 6, 2026 | gafam watch
On June 30, Chinese food-delivery giant Meituan open-sourced LongCat-2.0 — a 1.6-trillion-parameter model released under a permissive MIT license, which the company says is the first model of its scale trained and run entirely on domestic Chinese chips, with no Nvidia GPUs. The benchmark claims are self-reported and the full weights aren’t yet public. But the hardware milestone is the story — and it lands as Washington gates access to American models. gafam.ai reads what it means for Europe’s impossible AI choice.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 4, 2026 | meta ai
At an internal town hall on July 2, Mark Zuckerberg told staff Meta’s AI agent work “hasn’t accelerated in the way we expected,” and the restructuring behind 8,000 layoffs “hasn’t come to fruition yet.” Minutes later, AI chief Alexandr Wang told the same room that Meta’s next model, “Watermelon,” has caught up with OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 — using an order of magnitude more compute. Two messages, one room, and Meta’s $145 billion AI question sitting between them. gafam.ai reads the contradiction — and the European lesson inside it.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 3, 2026 | gafam watch
Starting July 6, Tesla will cap employee AI spending at $200 per week, after software engineers were burning through thousands of dollars in tokens weekly. It follows near-identical caps at Uber, Meta, Amazon and Walmart — the industry-wide shift from “tokenmaxxing” to “token budgeting.” There’s a telling carve-out: Musk exempted his own xAI products, while Tesla’s engineers reportedly prefer Anthropic’s Claude. gafam.ai reads the great AI cost reckoning — and what it means for a Europe with no in-house model to fall back on.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 2, 2026 | google ai
The EU Court of Justice today dismissed Google’s final appeal and upheld the €4.125 billion fine for abusing Android’s dominance — ending an eight-year legal fight with no further recourse. The original 2018 case was about forcing Google Search as the default. But the Android machine the court just ruled on is now the same machine distributing Gemini and Google’s AI to billions of devices. gafam.ai reads today’s ruling through the one lens the mainstream coverage misses: AI distribution.
