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 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.
by Raphael Dudler | Jun 24, 2026 | gafam watch
OpenAI expanded its Daybreak cybersecurity programme on June 22, releasing the full version of GPT-5.5-Cyber — its most capable vulnerability-finding model, scoring 85.6% on CyberGym — alongside “Patch the Planet,” an open-source security initiative with Trail of Bits and HackerOne. It is a direct competitive answer to Anthropic’s Project Glasswing. But the launch carries a warning that should concern every European organisation: AI now finds security flaws faster than humans can fix them. gafam.ai’s European analysis.
by Raphael Dudler | Jun 23, 2026 | gafam watch
Memory chipmaker Micron is investing in Anthropic’s Series H funding round and has secured a multi-year agreement to supply memory for Claude’s infrastructure, the company confirmed today. Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown called memory critical to both training and running its models. The deal extends a pattern gafam.ai has tracked all week: the AI supply chain is consolidating vertically, investor by investor, chip by chip — and Europe owns none of the layers. gafam.ai’s European analysis.
