In a single week of September, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta each unveiled frontier models — and so did China’s Alibaba, Zhipu, and DeepSeek. Europe unveiled none. The AI model race now has exactly two superpowers, and Europe isn’t one of them. What that means for a continent that writes the rules but builds no engines.
The first monthly update to the GAFAM Reality Index: overall down one point to 51%. The whole decline lands in a single dimension — Respect for Users — as Google’s screen-parsing assistant and Meta’s $17 billion child-addiction settlement drag two giants down. Europe and the Future held steady.
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.