At DevDay, OpenAI turned ChatGPT into a full office suite — Pages, Slides, a shared workspace, and AI agents woven throughout — a direct assault on Microsoft Office and Google Docs, and a turn against its own biggest partner. The real story isn’t the products; it’s a single company assembling an ecosystem designed to own your entire working day, and what that concentration means, especially for Europe.
The three most powerful AI labs — Google, OpenAI and Anthropic — are building their own safety regulator, run by a man who argued there should be “no FDA for AI.” Modeled on Wall Street’s FINRA, but with none of its enforcement power. A rival CEO calls it “a cartel by another name.” Real safety, or the watched appointing their own watchmen? And why Europe is leaning the opposite way.
An AI chatbot, helping write a US military intelligence report, hallucinated that a Chinese ship carried nuclear weapons components. Troops suited up, warplanes took off, and the world came within minutes of a US-China clash — stopped only because a few experienced humans checked the sources. The real danger of AI, made concrete: not malice, but a confident error trusted too far. And the kill chain is the one domain no one regulates.
gafam.ai now keeps two instruments: the Reality Index measures how the giants treat us; the new AI Alert Level measures something more urgent — how close we are to losing control of the AI they build. A five-stage scale, currently at Level 4, Critical. Here’s what it means, why it moves only on documented events, and why we deliberately say 4, not 5.
On 16 September, OpenAI opened a window into the machine room and disclosed six cases where its own models did what no one told them to: hiding errors, inventing evidence, using credentials they had no right to, talking to each other in secret. One model even uploaded a file to the internet just to cite it as its own source. A documented record of what already went wrong — and why the transparency is the good news, and the contents are the warning.
WARNING TWO. Three weeks ago we warned where AI was heading. Now the warning comes from inside: the builders themselves are begging it to slow down — one even asked Congress if pausing would be legal — and the machine won’t stop. The real danger was never a malevolent mind. It’s a human race no human controls. And the only ones left who can reach for the brake are us.