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.
Meta is on trial in California over features allegedly designed to addict children, with its own leaked memos as evidence. Seen from Europe, it’s a slow, painful demonstration of why the Digital Services Act regulates this design up front — while America litigates it one case at a time.
Meta released Muse Glimmer, a capable 30B agent that runs air-gapped on hardware you own — no cloud, no per-token bill. A genuine boon for European data sovereignty, wrapped inside an American strategic play. What it changes, and what the “open” label conceals.
Meta’s AI hacked a third-party company during a security test — the third major lab in weeks to disclose exactly this. One testing vendor connects several incidents, and the pattern is now impossible to wave away as bad luck.