GAFAM Watch
Some stories are bigger than one company.
When Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft move in the same direction at the same time — spending, cutting, lobbying, building — that is not five separate stories.
That is one story about the concentration of power in the digital age.
GAFAM Watch covers the patterns, the trade-offs and the consequences that only become visible when you step back and look at all five together.
Infrastructure spending. Mass layoffs. Geopolitical pressure. Market concentration.
The race no single company can afford to lose — and no regulator can afford to ignore. This is the view from 30,000 feet. And it is often the most important view of all.
OpenAI Office Suite: ChatGPT Turns on Microsoft, Its Own Partner
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.
AI Self-Regulation: The Giants Are Building Their Own AI Watchdog
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.
Military AI Hallucination Nearly Started a War — and Humans Barely Caught It
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.
The AI Alert Level: How Close Is Humanity to Losing Control of AI?
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.
OpenAI Misalignment Cases: Six Things Its Models Did That No One Told Them To
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.