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.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 8, 2026 | microsoft ai
Bloomberg reported on July 7 that Microsoft has begun routing tens of thousands of weekly Excel and Outlook AI prompts away from OpenAI and Anthropic to its own in-house MAI models, to reduce costs. It is not a clean partner break — frontier tasks still route out, and Microsoft declined to comment — but the direction is unmistakable: the distributor is demoting the labs from default engine to premium option. For a Europe whose offices run on Microsoft 365, the model behind your daily work is now being decided in Redmond. gafam.ai reads why that matters.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 2, 2026 | gafam watch
In a June 10 letter to US senators — surfaced publicly in late June — Anthropic accused operators affiliated with Alibaba and its Qwen AI lab of the largest known “distillation attack” on Claude: 28.8 million exchanges through roughly 25,000 fraudulent accounts over six weeks. Alibaba denies wrongdoing. The figures are Anthropic’s allegation and have not been independently verified. Yesterday we covered Meta’s fear of distillation from the inside; today, the same technique appears as a US-China national-security flashpoint. gafam.ai separates what is claimed from what is established — and reads the European consequence.
by Raphael Dudler | Jun 30, 2026 | meta ai
Internal Meta documents reviewed by The Information reveal that the company has restricted its engineers from using Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex — and even paused some tasks entirely. The reason is not cost. It is fear of “distillation”: that outputs from rival models could seep into Meta’s own training data and contaminate its Llama models, triggering what an internal memo called “serious escalations with partner companies.” It is a rare, revealing glimpse into how zero-sum the frontier AI race has become. gafam.ai’s European analysis.
by Raphael Dudler | Jun 29, 2026 | gafam watch
On Friday, June 26, the US government partially reversed the export control directive that took Anthropic’s most powerful models offline two weeks ago. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick authorised the release of Claude Mythos 5 to roughly 100 named US institutions — major companies and government agencies on an “Annex A” list — and their foreign-national employees. Fable 5, the public version, remains restricted. The resolution confirms what gafam.ai has tracked for three weeks: a new American regime now governs who may access frontier AI. European users are not on the list. gafam.ai’s European analysis.
