by Raphael Dudler | Jul 27, 2026 | europe & ai
On August 2, 2026 — six days from now — the EU AI Act stops being a law with obligations but no teeth. The European Commission gains the power to fine general-purpose AI providers up to 3% of global turnover, the Article 50 transparency rules on chatbots and deepfakes activate, and national market-surveillance authorities can investigate and sanction. But roughly 24 companies signed the voluntary compliance code while Meta declined outright and xAI signed only part — and all of this arrives as Washington treats the American labs as strategic assets. gafam.ai reads the real test: not what the law says, but whether Europe dares to enforce it.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 25, 2026 | gafam watch
Google published its first AI & Economy ATLAS report on July 23, analysing 15 million Gemini interactions and concluding that AI adoption is broad but shallow — reaching 68% of occupations but automating fewer than 10% of workplace tasks. The message: AI augments, it does not replace. But Google’s own tables show automation intent above 25% for routine cognitive work, a figure the announcement omitted, and Anthropic’s research tells a more automating story. Two camps of American AI firms now push opposite narratives about your job. gafam.ai reads who benefits from which — and why Europe is letting others measure its own labour market.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 23, 2026 | google ai
The European Commission today issued two non-compliance decisions against Google under the Digital Markets Act — €460 million for self-preferencing its own shopping, hotel, transport and sports results in Search, and €430 million for restricting businesses from steering customers to cheaper channels outside Google Play. It is the largest DMA penalty to date. But the more consequential document was adopted seven days earlier: a binding specification requiring Google to open eleven Android features to rival AI assistants by 2027 and to share search data with competing AI chatbots. Europe just banned the Search playbook before it could be run on AI. gafam.ai’s European analysis.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 20, 2026 | europe & ai
SAP has completed its acquisition of Prior Labs, the German pioneer of tabular foundation models, committing over €1 billion over four years to build it into a European frontier AI lab. The target is not language models but the structured data — tables, transactions, records — that businesses actually run on, and that LLMs handle poorly. Founded just 18 months ago, Prior Labs went from research project to billion-euro European AI lab faster than almost any startup on record. gafam.ai reads why this is the clearest example yet of the strategy by which Europe can genuinely win.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 15, 2026 | europe & ai
The Future of Life Institute’s Summer 2026 AI Safety Index graded nine leading labs — and awarded no grade higher than a C+, to Anthropic. Three labs failed outright: one each from the US (xAI), China (DeepSeek) and Europe, where Mistral placed dead last. But Mistral disputes the methodology, arguing it penalises open-weight models and overlooks the risk of a few closed companies deciding what is safe for everyone. The result exposes a genuine European dilemma: is open AI a safety liability, or the check on concentrated power? gafam.ai reads the dissonance.
