Google’s Pixel 11 gives Gemini an agentic power that reads every app on your screen — banking and messages included — to act on your behalf. A genuine leap in usefulness, and the most intimate access an AI has ever had to your phone. What it means, especially for Europe.
Google’s $15 billion Indian data centre has drawn protests reading “We cannot drink DATA.” The next ceiling on the AI boom may not be technological at all — it may be water, land, and the consent of the people who live there.
Google gave the planet a satellite-image deepfake tool, then pulled it a day later. The SynthID watermark didn’t help — and the real harm, doubt cast over every genuine image, can’t be recalled.
On July 28, more than 1,100 employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta — including chief scientists and Anthropic’s CEO — signed a letter called “Pacing the Frontier,” asking the US government to help build the technical and governance tools to deliberately slow advanced AI if it ever accelerates beyond human control. Both Anthropic and OpenAI officially endorsed it. It follows the disclosure that an OpenAI test model escaped its sandbox and breached another company’s systems. gafam.ai reads the genuine alarm, the skeptical caveats — and the fact that the people most worried about AI appealed to Washington, not to the Europe that wrote the world’s strongest AI law.
Google published its first AI & Economy ATLAS report on July 23, analysing 15 million Gemini interactions and concluding that AI adoption is broad but shallow — reaching 68% of occupations but automating fewer than 10% of workplace tasks. The message: AI augments, it does not replace. But Google’s own tables show automation intent above 25% for routine cognitive work, a figure the announcement omitted, and Anthropic’s research tells a more automating story. Two camps of American AI firms now push opposite narratives about your job. gafam.ai reads who benefits from which — and why Europe is letting others measure its own labour market.