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 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 | Jun 1, 2026 | microsoft ai
Today, June 1, 2026, GitHub Copilot switches from flat-rate subscriptions to usage-based token billing. Every plan. Every user. Every organisation. The era of unlimited AI coding at a fixed price is over. Developers who use Copilot heavily for agentic tasks face bills that could be significantly higher than their previous flat-rate subscription. The enterprises that did not prepare face meter shock. gafam.ai explains what changed, what it costs and what European developers and enterprises must do today.
by Raphael Dudler | May 28, 2026 | gafam watch
Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in four months. Microsoft cancelled its internal Claude Code pilot after token billing consumed its annual AI budget. Duolingo is questioning whether AI adoption translates to business outcomes. A Gartner study forecasts AI agent software spending will reach $207 billion in 2026 — up 139% from 2025. The enterprise AI cost crisis is the story Wall Street is not yet pricing. gafam.ai examines what happens when AI costs more than the humans it was supposed to replace.
by Raphael Dudler | May 23, 2026 | microsoft ai
Microsoft invested $13 billion in OpenAI and built Copilot on GPT models. Now it is building its own. The MAI Superintelligence team — led by Mustafa Suleyman — has released MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-Image-2, all priced below Google and OpenAI equivalents. Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing changes July 1, 2026. Global AI adoption reaches 17.8% of working age population. Microsoft is not reducing its OpenAI relationship. It is building an exit ramp — quietly, deliberately, and faster than anyone expected.
