by Raphael Dudler | Jul 27, 2026 | europe & ai
On August 2, 2026 — six days from now — the EU AI Act stops being a law with obligations but no teeth. The European Commission gains the power to fine general-purpose AI providers up to 3% of global turnover, the Article 50 transparency rules on chatbots and deepfakes activate, and national market-surveillance authorities can investigate and sanction. But roughly 24 companies signed the voluntary compliance code while Meta declined outright and xAI signed only part — and all of this arrives as Washington treats the American labs as strategic assets. gafam.ai reads the real test: not what the law says, but whether Europe dares to enforce it.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 11, 2026 | meta ai
Meta launched Muse Image on July 9 — a feature inside Meta AI that lets any user @-tag a public Instagram account and generate an AI image using that person’s likeness, with no notice and no consent, because public accounts are opted in by default. SAG-AFTRA, Public Citizen and top talent agencies condemned it within a day. Meta points to an invisible AI watermark and an opt-out toggle. But in Europe, an opt-out-by-default model collides directly with the GDPR’s consent requirements and the EU AI Act’s transparency rules. gafam.ai reads the European reckoning.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 4, 2026 | meta ai
At an internal town hall on July 2, Mark Zuckerberg told staff Meta’s AI agent work “hasn’t accelerated in the way we expected,” and the restructuring behind 8,000 layoffs “hasn’t come to fruition yet.” Minutes later, AI chief Alexandr Wang told the same room that Meta’s next model, “Watermelon,” has caught up with OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 — using an order of magnitude more compute. Two messages, one room, and Meta’s $145 billion AI question sitting between them. gafam.ai reads the contradiction — and the European lesson inside it.
by Raphael Dudler | Jun 30, 2026 | meta ai
Internal Meta documents reviewed by The Information reveal that the company has restricted its engineers from using Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex — and even paused some tasks entirely. The reason is not cost. It is fear of “distillation”: that outputs from rival models could seep into Meta’s own training data and contaminate its Llama models, triggering what an internal memo called “serious escalations with partner companies.” It is a rare, revealing glimpse into how zero-sum the frontier AI race has become. gafam.ai’s European analysis.
by Raphael Dudler | Jun 10, 2026 | gafam watch
The acronym that defined Big Tech for a decade is being replaced. Industry executives and observers are adopting “MANGO” — Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI — to describe the dominant players of the AI era. Apple has been dropped. Amazon and Microsoft have been sidelined. And Apple placed near the bottom of the Wall Street Journal’s AI readiness ranking, trailing Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon. The intelligence era has new power centres. gafam.ai examines what this means — and why the publication named after the old acronym is perfectly positioned to cover the new one.
