by Raphael Dudler | Jul 13, 2026 | apple ai
On July 10, Apple sued OpenAI, io Products and two former Apple engineers in federal court, alleging a pattern of trade secret theft to fuel OpenAI’s consumer-hardware ambitions — including its hardware chief Tang Tan, a 24-year Apple veteran. Apple says over 400 of its former staff now work at OpenAI. These are allegations in a complaint; OpenAI denies them and nothing is proven. But the deeper story is the AI hardware race — the fight over the device that replaces the smartphone — and it is being waged entirely between American companies. gafam.ai reads what that means for a Europe absent from the hardware layer.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 9, 2026 | europe & ai
On July 8, France’s Mistral released Robostral Navigate, a physical-AI model that lets robots navigate complex environments using a single camera and basic language prompts — hardware-agnostic, trained entirely in simulation, and already tied to major European industrial customers. Alongside an open-weight frontier model entering July early access and a €4 billion data-center buildout, it reveals a deliberate strategy: Europe’s clearest AI champion is not trying to out-scale OpenAI at the chatbot frontier, but competing on sovereignty, openness and physical AI. After a month of documenting European dependency, gafam.ai reads what Europe is actually building.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 1, 2026 | europe & ai
In 32 days — on August 2, 2026 — three enforcement mechanisms of the EU AI Act activate simultaneously: Article 50 transparency obligations, penalty powers over general-purpose AI providers, and full national market-surveillance authority. But the Digital Omnibus deal of May 7 quietly deferred the Act’s most demanding high-risk obligations to December 2027. The result is a law that arrives in 32 days with real teeth in some areas and a postponed bite in others. gafam.ai maps what actually switches on — for GAFAM, and for every publisher using AI, including this one.
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.
by Raphael Dudler | Jun 27, 2026 | gafam watch
SpaceX has agreed to acquire Anysphere, the maker of the AI coding tool Cursor, for $60 billion in an all-stock deal — widely described as the largest acquisition of a venture-backed startup ever recorded. It lands days after SpaceX’s $75 billion IPO, the biggest in history, and folds one of the most widely used developer tools into Elon Musk’s xAI empire. With two-thirds of the Fortune 500 using Cursor, the question for Europe is uncomfortable: the AI that writes a growing share of the world’s code is now owned by the same handful of American giants. gafam.ai’s European analysis.
