by Raphael Dudler | Jul 13, 2026 | apple ai
On July 10, Apple sued OpenAI, io Products and two former Apple engineers in federal court, alleging a pattern of trade secret theft to fuel OpenAI’s consumer-hardware ambitions — including its hardware chief Tang Tan, a 24-year Apple veteran. Apple says over 400 of its former staff now work at OpenAI. These are allegations in a complaint; OpenAI denies them and nothing is proven. But the deeper story is the AI hardware race — the fight over the device that replaces the smartphone — and it is being waged entirely between American companies. gafam.ai reads what that means for a Europe absent from the hardware layer.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 8, 2026 | microsoft ai
Bloomberg reported on July 7 that Microsoft has begun routing tens of thousands of weekly Excel and Outlook AI prompts away from OpenAI and Anthropic to its own in-house MAI models, to reduce costs. It is not a clean partner break — frontier tasks still route out, and Microsoft declined to comment — but the direction is unmistakable: the distributor is demoting the labs from default engine to premium option. For a Europe whose offices run on Microsoft 365, the model behind your daily work is now being decided in Redmond. gafam.ai reads why that matters.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 7, 2026 | gafam watch
OpenAI has proposed handing the US government a 5% equity stake — worth roughly $42.6 billion — through a vehicle modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund, and wants Anthropic, Google and Meta to cede matching stakes. It remains a proposal, not a deal: rivals haven’t agreed, Congress hasn’t acted, and Reuters could not independently verify it. But if any version proceeds, it rewires every future AI fight — because a government that owns AI companies cannot regulate them impartially. gafam.ai reads what state ownership of AI means for Europe.
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 25, 2026 | europe & ai
Two developments this week reshape Europe’s access to frontier cyber-AI. Anthropic is offering the EU access to its Mythos cybersecurity model — its first expansion beyond the US and UK — with talks with the EU cybersecurity agency ENISA ongoing. Simultaneously, OpenAI is giving nine major UK banks access to its GPT-5.5-Cyber tool, filling the gap left by Anthropic’s tightly restricted Mythos. After weeks of watching Europe locked out of American AI, the direction has reversed — but the terms deserve scrutiny. gafam.ai’s European analysis.
