At DevDay, OpenAI turned ChatGPT into a full office suite — Pages, Slides, a shared workspace, and AI agents woven throughout — a direct assault on Microsoft Office and Google Docs, and a turn against its own biggest partner. The real story isn’t the products; it’s a single company assembling an ecosystem designed to own your entire working day, and what that concentration means, especially for Europe.
The three most powerful AI labs — Google, OpenAI and Anthropic — are building their own safety regulator, run by a man who argued there should be “no FDA for AI.” Modeled on Wall Street’s FINRA, but with none of its enforcement power. A rival CEO calls it “a cartel by another name.” Real safety, or the watched appointing their own watchmen? And why Europe is leaning the opposite way.
In public, Big Tech calls AI training on copyrighted work fair use. In private, unsealed court filings reveal a senior Microsoft scientist called it “perhaps the largest theft of labor in human history,” while an OpenAI exec called its own models an “existential threat” to publishers. The gap between the podium and the memo — and why Europe’s permission-first approach suddenly looks like foresight.
WARNING TWO. Three weeks ago we warned where AI was heading. Now the warning comes from inside: the builders themselves are begging it to slow down — one even asked Congress if pausing would be legal — and the machine won’t stop. The real danger was never a malevolent mind. It’s a human race no human controls. And the only ones left who can reach for the brake are us.
OpenAI, long a regulation skeptic, now asks the US for binding AI safety rules — the very framework Europe built and was mocked for. A genuine vindication of the European approach. But the rules OpenAI favours are capability-based, which critics warn could entrench the dominant labs. Take the vindication, then read the fine print.