The European Investment Bank is due to sign a framework agreement with Canada this week that will pave the way for investments into critical raw materials and other areas, a Bank official told POLITICO.
The deal with the long-term lending arm of the European Union is expected to be signed on the sidelines of an EU-Canada summit on Thursday in Montreal, said the official who was granted anonymity to discuss internal preparations.
Such a deal would mark a concrete step toward closer ties amid broader discussions about cooperation on arctic security and the EU’s potential offer of “associate member” status to Canada. The summit will aim to highlight deepening ties between like-minded partners.
The signing follows a September visit to Ottawa by EIB President Nadia Calviño, during which she took the first steps toward establishing a permanent Canadian presence for the bank.
The imminent framework agreement is significant given that the EIB typically operates only in developing countries or members of the EU or the European Economic Area.
Earlier this year, Canada offered G7 members “priority access” to its critical raw minerals stockpile, according to a letter seen by POLITICO. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has also said he wants to boost EU-Canada cooperation on critical raw materials.
Jess Asato’s public campaigning for victims of online abuse put her in the crosshairs of Grok’s deepfake scandal. Then the UK member of parliament became a victim of the abuse herself.
The EU’s border agency, Frontex, will be able to monitor social media for information about migration flows.
The European Commission on Tuesday unveiled a revamp of Frontex, strengthening its capabilities and capacity to tackle illegal migration. It will play a more prominent role in deporting people with no legal right to remain in the EU, including new powers to carry out return operations beyond the bloc’s territory and new oversight on social media.
The role of social media platforms in spreading information that contributes to illegal migration was central to the crisis in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, where thousands of migrants illegally crossed the border within a few hours in July.
The new rules will create within Frontex “an online monitoring and response center to monitor publicly accessible social media content to detect developments relevant to external border management, and also to support action against illegal online content linked to border security risks,” EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen told reporters on Tuesday.
The agency will also “be acting as a trusted flagger under the Digital Services Act, flagging illegal content to online platforms, and requesting national authorities to issue removal orders where appropriate,” the Commission said in press material.
Being a “trusted flagger” under the DSA, the EU’s landmark social media rules, is a special status granted by national digital regulators. Content flagged by entities with this status is put on a fast track to be dealt with by online platforms.
Virkkunen said Frontex will apply for this status with national authorities, and she expected the border agency to be approved because of its “special expertise.”
PARIS — The French government explored ways of blocking social networks during last Saturday’s protests, two people familiar with the plan told POLITICO.
In the week leading up to Oct. 24, the French interior ministry was in touch with telecom operators to explore ways of cutting access to social networks or even to mobile internet in specific areas to prevent rioters from coordinating, according to one government official from the Prime Minister’s office and one employee of a telecom company.
The push culminated in Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu directly asking French telecom operators to be ready to block access to TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and X, in a letter revealed by French digital outlet Blast, which first reported on the government’s request.
Contacted by POLITICO, officials from Lecornu’s office, the technology ministry and the interior ministry did not deny the move nor the letter’s existence.
The government feared that the scenes of violence seen on Oct. 17 could repeat or escalate on the following weekend — a concern that did not materialize, as far fewer incidents were recorded on Oct. 24.
“What they wanted, above all, was to block the communication channels that allow gangs to meet up and organize,” said the employee of a telecommunications provider, who was granted anonymity to speak freely.
The move, however, would have also prevented peaceful protesters from communicating as well. Blocking access to social networks in a targeted area, such as a specific neighborhood, is not technically possible, while cutting access to mobile internet would cause major disruptions to other key services such as mobile payments, security-surveillance devices and emergency communications.
The government also considered a less radical solution that would disable geolocation display features “to prevent gatherings of people who don’t know each other, for example,” according to the official from the prime minister’s office.
Other limitations on social media access are being discussed in parliament as part of the debate on the so-called “who breaks pays” bill, which would hold people who “knowingly took part” in a riot financially responsible — whether or not they committed property damage themselves.
The same bill would require platforms to remove within 24 hours content that incites physical or sexual assault, theft, destruction, or property damage, “when such content is likely to cause a serious disturbance to public order” and within one hour content that encourages insurrection.
Other lawmakers are proposing measures ranging from tracking troublemakers via algorithmic video surveillance to penalizing online marketplaces that fail to prevent the sale of stolen goods.
Finland’s President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre held a joint call with Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Tuesday as part of international efforts to secure an end to the war in Ukraine.
“The discussion was frank and substantive,” said Stubb in a statement after the call. “We are neighboring countries to Russia. The outcome of this war will have a direct impact on our and the broader European security. Ending the war requires direct discussions.”
The conversation was held in consultation with Kyiv and the two leaders — who are firm allies of Ukraine — were not speaking as official representatives of Europe as a whole.
But the call comes at a delicate moment in the four-year-long war as European officials bid for a place at the negotiating table, with U.S. President Donald Trump pushing for a peace deal. Two EU officials said the President of the European Council, António Costa, had been told of the planned call in advance.
Støre said the two European leaders stressed the importance of de-escalation in the call with Putin. “The war comes with enormous human and material costs. The suffering and destruction will impact generations,” he added.
Stubb’s office described the call as a follow-up to talks in Oslo on Oct. 20, in which the two European leaders were joined by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, who then traveled to meet Putin in Russia the following day.
The Kremlin issued a dry statement simply confirming that “the sides exchanged views on the resolution of the Ukrainian crisis,” and that settling the conflict was the main topic of Tuesday’s call. The statement added that the outcome of Putin’s talks with Witkoff was also taken into account, according to Russia’s state-owned TASS news agency.
Stubb and Støre are close friends and speak frequently, and they were together in Helsinki for the conversation with Putin. According to a statement from the Finnish president’s office, the two leaders wanted to tell the Russian leader directly that they would continue supporting Ukraine and that peace negotiations must resume, looking ahead to the planned meetings in Abu Dhabi.
They also told the Russian leader that they had a shared interest in the stability of the Baltic Sea region and the High North.
Stubb and Støre briefed Zelenskyy after the call. “I am grateful for the detailed briefing and for their active support for our diplomacy and the peace efforts we are pursuing together with all our partners,” the Ukrainian president said in a post on X. “Alex and Jonas made it clear to the Russian leader that real de-escalatory steps are needed regarding our energy and infrastructure.”
“We discussed preparations for the trilateral meeting planned for November at the team level — Ukrainian, American, and Russian,” Zelenskyy said. “Finland and Norway, as countries that border Russia, have a particular interest in sound and reliable security arrangements. We also discussed various formats for our engagement with partners in Europe that could be useful in further supporting diplomacy, our defense, and our shared security.”
Not everyone was impressed with Stubb and Støre’s move. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said she was “very skeptical” about the initiative. European countries had not been involved in coordinating the call, she said, adding: “I believe we should keep Europe united rather than going it alone.”
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said peace must come through “strength” rather than “appeasement” of Russia, and if the talks lead to this then they will be welcome. But previous attempts to talk to Putin have not delivered progress and there are no signs he wants a truce, Kristersson added.
Paula Pinho, spokesperson for the European Commission, said: “We take note of the call, which took place solely on a bilateral basis, and is a follow-up of the meeting in Oslo.” The EU side is “united in our commitment not only to put an end to this horrific war but to achieve peace that will be just and sustainable,” she said.
“That is our aim and that is the stance we are defending in the ongoing talks. These negotiations are happening in different formats, different places and different levels involving heads of states and government, ministers, senior diplomats and officials. The EU is involved.”
The last staunch European supporter of Ukraine to speak to Putin at leader level is believed to have been French President Emmanuel Macron in July 2025. Some EU leaders like Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico and former Hungarian premier Viktor Orban have maintained semi-regular contact with the Russian president in recent years, despite the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
EU diplomats and officials have been considering how to ensure Ukraine’s allies in Europe can play a meaningful part in negotiations on a ceasefire and longer term peace agreement. Stubb’s name emerged as one of the potential leaders who could take on the job of representing Europe and bolstering Ukraine in face-to-face talks with Trump and Putin.
He is one of the few EU leaders and Ukraine backers who has maintained a healthy relationship with Trump at a time of strained relations across the Atlantic. Finland also shares a 1,300 kilometer border with Russia, meaning Stubb and his officials already have valuable experience of dealing with a threatening and unpredictable neighbor.
Sebastian Starcevic contributed reporting. This article has been updated.
LONDON — U.K. Chancellor John Healey is set to deliver an unexpected increase in defense spending at his first budget on Wednesday, as Britain strains to reach its NATO commitment to spend 3.5% of GDP on defense by 2035.
Healey — who quit as defense secretary in the dying days of Keir Starmer’s government over a funding row — hopes he can show how Britain will start to reach that target now that he’s safely ensconced in the powerful Treasury.
Until last week, it was assumed that the top finance minister would defer decisions on ramping up funding until next year’s multi-year, government-wide spending review. So Wednesday’s move could represent an early win for the Ministry of Defence in Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s new government.
But with regular warnings in the press and in public about Britain’s unpreparedness for conflict, there’s much more to watch for beyond Wednesday’s headline hike. POLITICO walks through the seven key details and defense industry demands.
1) How will Healey play the numbers game?
Healey’s government-rocking resignation back in June was explicitly over a refusal in Downing Street and the Treasury to commit to spending3% of GDP on defense by 2030.
Now that he is leading the Treasury, Healey is under pressure to deliver on that. But even that keeps Britain shy of the bigger NATO aim.
On existing plans, U.K. defense spending is set to rise to 2.7% next year and remain flat until 2030. Healey’s first move will be to fill the £4.7 billion black hole in defense funding in the Defence Investment Plan — meant to overhaul the armed forces and improve readiness — published earlier this year.
More money is now expected beyond this, briefed to the media in recent days as a “down payment” towards spending 3% on defense by 2030.
But two government officials, granted anonymity like others in this article to discuss internal thinking, said the pathway to meeting NATO’s larger, 3.5% target will only come in next year’s spending review, not the budget.
Even on the smaller measure, the margins for the chancellor are tight, with government spending rules and debt targets leaving little room for maneuver. Mike Martin, an MP on the House of Commons Defense Committee, told POLITICO: “They have got themselves into a straitjacket over defense spending and none of this will be resolved before the next election. This is why I think an early general election is inevitable.”
2) Will the chancellor move to funnel private capital into defense?
Britain’s defense industry has long called for more direct government spending on domestic contracts. But the sector also wants more private capital flowing into U.K. firms, and will be looking to Healey to set the conditions.
The Financial Times reported last week that Healey will allocate £15.4 billion to the country’s National Wealth Fund and £5 billion to the British Business Bank — a share of which could end up with defense companies.
Two key details to watch here are whether the government claims this money counts towards its wider defense spending commitments, or whether any cash is allocated purely for defense firms. Potential reforms to and incentives for pools of private capital, such as pension funds and venture capital funds, to invest in defense would also be welcomed by the sector in this budget — but the industry may be left waiting.
One of the government officials cited above said that a Defence Finance and Investment Strategy is slated for December, with a Defense Investment Summit coming December 1.
3) Where does Healey stand on global defense team-ups?
On Sunday evening, the Treasury disclosed that it would not join the Canadian-led Defence, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB) — a proposed multinational financial institution with its own AAA credit rating that aims to provide cheap loans for countries to invest in defense.
The U.K. had previously considered joining the bank, or merging it with its own separate initiative, the Multilateral Defence Mechanism (MDM) — a planned scheme for joint defense procurement, stockpiling and supply chains for member countries.
But a joint statement with Ottawa said that the institutions will now work in partnership.
The MDM currently has £400 million allocated from June’s Defence Investment Plan, while none of the other member nations — the Netherlands, Finland and Poland — have confirmed whether they have contributed capital to the project.
Now that uncertainty over Britain’s membership of the DSRB has gone, the government will be looking to flesh out its plans for its own MDM.
4) Can the chancellor slash energy and manufacturing costs?
Two industry figures told POLITICO that one of the biggest barriers to doing defense business in Britain — making it less attractive than other nations — is the country’s comparatively high energy costs.
However, slashing costs for energy-intensive industries, including the industrial base of the defense sector is expensive, and schemes aimed at reducing costs — such as the British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme – already exist. Measures reportedly under consideration this time around appear to focus more on reducing households’ energy costs than on supporting businesses.
A third industry figure predicted that ministers would not offer immediate support for business energy bills because “every possible option” for instant help “is too expensive.” But a defense industry investor said the Treasury is, however, looking at reducing the financial burden of machinery — which they said is a key issue for small firms wanting to ramp up production as part of the supply chain.
5) What does Buy British actually mean?
The government has been consulting with the defense sector and wider British industry over what exactly constitutes a British company under its plans to implement a new “Buy British” scheme.
The plan aims to bring together Andy Burnham’s pledges of re-industrialization and more evenly-spread growth across the country, and comes after the EU proposed its own Made in Europe procurement plan to try and boost the bloc’s own firms.
The push is also designed to build sovereign capability, which has become increasingly important to Britain amid fears that the U.S. is an unreliable ally. The recent row over Ukraine’s constrained access to the Starlink satellite system has exacerbated such concerns.
Early suggestions indicate the government will take a broad definition — in a potential boost for multinational defense giants. Rupert Pearce, the Ministry of Defence’s National Armaments Director, told a recent industry event that, from his perspective, French defense company Thales, which has a headquarters in the U.K., “is a British company.”
6) Will Healey move further on AI and hybrid defenses?
Ahead of the budget, Healey’s Treasury announced a series of AI-specific policies with potential defense applications.
These include £165 million for AI-driven detection and surveillance of biological threats — a move first teased by the boss of Britain’s MI5 intelligence service.
The government will also put £60 million into its Sovereign AI fund to invest in British tech companies, including autonomous systems, robotics, and advanced manufacturing.
Watch to see whether the chancellor waves around more promises of boosting British resilience to malign actors on Wednesday.
7) Will Donald Trump even notice?
Britain’s comparatively slow progress on defense spending has already caught the eye of the Trump administration.
Warren Stephens, the U.S. ambassador to the U.K., warned earlier this year that Britain must make “sustained investment” in defense, rather than focusing on “other spending priorities,” and warned against “backloading” defense spending to a later date.
A lack of a meaningful movement on defense spending — or at least eye-catching claims from opposition parties that Healey has fumbled it — could grab the attention of Trump’s team this time around. The timing is tricky: the Pentagon is currently undertaking a review of American military assets stationed in mainland Europe and the U.K.
Europe is living through an “era of darkness” as multiple wars and competition between the U.S. and China trample the rules-based global order, Finnish President Alexander Stubb said Monday.
Speaking at the College of Europe in Bruges, Stubb said the post-Cold War age has ended and the world now faces a pivotal moment, like those at the end of World War II in 1945 and the fall of communism in 1989.
While he tends towards optimism, there are now “unfortunately, plenty of reasons to be pessimistic,” he told an audience of students at the institution, which Stubb himself attended in the 1990s.
“In a sense, I began my studies during an era of light and you begin your studies in an era of darkness,” he said. “We used to be able to say that the three biggest killers of mankind, disease, famine and wars, have been defeated. That is not true anymore. The light has given way to darkness.”
Stubb, who has studied and written extensively on geopolitical upheaval, has been intimately involved in European efforts to navigate U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term — particularly when it comes to the question of a peace deal for Ukraine.
He told his audience they would graduate into “a dog-eat-dog world” in which there are, by some estimates, 65 conflicts or wars playing out — “more than at any time after the Second World War.”
Global security will “depend on what the big powers — namely the U.S. and China — end up doing. Will they choose co-operation or confrontation?” he said.
“The key question for all of us is to create a European security structure which makes sure that Russia does not attack its neighbors again,” he said. NATO will remain a vital security alliance but new processes should also be developed, he said, including “confidence building” measures between Russia and Europe to build “trust.”
Stubb urged the audience of future diplomats, politicians and officials not to be pessimistic, but to be ambitious for a new “era of light,” despite the challenges. He said that in 30 years’ time, the European Union could grow to 40 member countries from the current 27 — including the U.K. rejoining the bloc alongside Norway, Moldova and Ukraine.
Two US senators say the Trump administration is breaking the law by withholding the FISA court decision while it presses Congress to renew America’s most sweeping surveillance program.
A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security made an unusual request of its agency focused on cybersecurity: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.
The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machine, examine it and report back the findings so they could be given to the White House, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request.
The proposition was shocking to CISA’s career staffers, according to one of the former officials. CISA typically worked to thwart hackers. Moreover, the agency had been directed not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws, contrary to its standard practices. The request made the CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference.
“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like,” one of the former officials said. “This goes against everything CISA represents.”
The CISA employees repeatedly told the political appointees that their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative. The appointees eventually stopped pressing CISA.
Though not acted on, the request shows how the Trump administration has tried to use the agency for its own ends while draining it of resources for one of its critical missions: protecting the nation’s voting systems.
In Trump’s second term, his administration has laid off or pushed out more than 1,000 CISA employees, shrinking the agency by about one-third. The president’s 2027 budget proposal would reduce funding for the agency by another $700 million, which could necessitate 900 additional layoffs.
In response, Democratic lawmakers have called for an investigation into CISA’s ability to do its job and demanded answers as to why federal funds are not being used to support election security as directed by Congress.
Since Trump signed the CISA Act in 2018, the agency has worked with state authorities and voting machine vendors to help protect election infrastructure from cyberattacks. During Trump’s second term, though, CISA has abandoned much of this work. Several state election authorities said the agency provided them no assistance — and no explanation for its absence — during the most critical planning stages for the upcoming midterms.
“There is a difference between deprioritizing and being nonexistent,” said Ryan Macias, an election technology and cybersecurity expert who has worked as a consultant for CISA. In 2025 and through mid-September 2026 — when the bulk of preparations for the election typically would have been completed — “they were nonexistent. Literally nonexistent.”
While Trump has repeatedly warned that America’s elections are vulnerable to hacking, in some cases repeating disproven claims, experts said his administration is undermining the federal government’s role in helping secure them.
Though CISA re-emerged in September with a last-minute security plan for the election, some state officials told ProPublica they fear that what is left of the agency has been compromised by a conspiracy-obsessed presidential administration. In recent months, in reviving debunked theories about the 2020 election, the Trump administration has declassified troves of records, including sensitive material that state officials provided to CISA. Some state authorities said they no longer trusted the administration enough to share information with CISA, a key to the agency’s success in past elections.
“They’ve violated the entire premise of that information-sharing relationship,” said one former high-ranking federal cybersecurity official who now advises state governments on national security. “There’s no fucking way they’re ever going to give any information to CISA. And it’s unclear if they ever will in the future.”
A spokesperson for the White House declined an interview request but defended Trump’s handling of election security in an emailed statement. “President Trump has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections,” said Lauren Bis.
Bis referred specific questions about CISA’s handling of elections to DHS. DHS and CISA did not respond to interview requests or to a detailed list of questions.
“There’s no fucking way [state governments are] ever going to give any information to CISA. And it’s unclear if they ever will in the future.”
A former federal cybersecurity official who advises state governments
Current and former CISA employees and state election officials describe an agency that has become significantly less equipped to help states fight legitimate cyber threats. State leaders say they have used their own resources to shore up gaps left by CISA, such as paying for sensor technology that can detect unusual activity in election networks. But some services, like intel on foreign actors, can’t be replicated. Some people interviewed said they were worried that Trump and his allies continue to ratchet up rhetoric about voting security, particularly about threats to voting machines. Officials in one large voting jurisdiction said they have met privately with machine vendors to come up with a contingency plan if the federal government seizes their machines or declares them unusable.
“I don’t pay attention to what the president says. I pay attention to what his administration does,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said. “And what they’ve done is basically cut us off and left us on our own.”
Defending elections from hackers wasn’t always part of DHS’s remit.
Throughout the mid-1990s and 2000s, a series of cyberattacks rocked the federal government, demonstrating the emerging threat. In 2007, hackers broke into the Pentagon and stole terabytes of sensitive data. The digital heist, by an unknown foreign adversary, was so damaging that one intelligence leader later described it as an “espionage Pearl Harbor.”
Under George W. Bush, DHS underwent a reorganization to more effectively combat terrorism and respond to disasters like Hurricane Katrina. The department dedicated resources under an office called the National Protection and Programs Directorate to help fortify advanced cyber defense systems and important infrastructure. The office’s work ranged from helping secure events like the Super Bowl to protecting chemical plants to issuing cybersecurity warnings to the private sector and the public. In 2018, Trump signed a bill making the office a stand-alone agency, allowing for more federal funding and transforming it into, essentially, the ultimate tech support desk for anything DHS designated “critical infrastructure.” The bill renamed the agency CISA.
Though Trump helped create CISA, he didn’t much appreciate the work the agency did under its old name to expose the extent of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Russian agents had unleashed a massive disinformation campaign, with a Kremlin-backed troll farm creating thousands of social media accounts posing as Americans and promoting Trump, according to bipartisan reports from the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released before the 2020 election. A dozen Russian military agents were indicted for what the Justice Department described as “a sustained effort to hack into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton.”
Trump publicly downplayed this interference, but DHS leadership saw the Russia attack as an escalation. In January 2017, before Trump took office, DHS upgraded America’s elections to the status of critical infrastructure. This placed the polls and all voting technology used in federal elections under the watch of what would soon become CISA.
To carry out this function, CISA needed help. But states and voting machine vendors were wary about sharing data on weaknesses in voting systems, fearing it could be exploited if certain details were to become public. State officials were also reluctant to cede any role in election preparation to the federal government.
Gradually, though, CISA and state election officials negotiated a fragile trust. At its center was a commitment: The sensitive information states and vendors shared with CISA would be kept confidential.
“It took years and years of building trust, of talking to election officials, of hiring people with elections experience who could be validators for the work that CISA wanted to do, before they finally built strong working relationships,” said Derek Tisler, who specializes in election security as counsel for the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan institute based out of New York University School of Law.
Under Director Chris Krebs, CISA hosted penetration testing in which its agents would try to hack into a state’s system to locate weaknesses that could then be patched, along with tabletop exercises simulating a series of potential catastrophes around elections. CISA also offered regular secret-level briefings to secretaries of state to share federal intelligence. And CISA paid for sensor technology that looked for potential malicious online activity on election networks, notifying officials about emerging threats.
“The staffing was there, the expertise was there, the visibility was there, the funding was there,” Macias said.
The consortium shared data as run of the mill as spambots as well as more serious threats. If Virginia caught unusual activity in its system, it could let other states know to be vigilant.
While CISA had prepared for attacks from the Chinese and Russian governments, or lone wolf hackers, few there had expected the threat to elections would come from inside the White House. But when Trump refused to concede to Joe Biden in 2020, claiming the vote had been rigged, CISA became a key component of the guardrails that ultimately led to the election results being certified.
The agency, in a statement co-signed by secretaries of state and voting machine vendors, vouched for the election’s integrity, calling it “the most secure in American history.” When Krebs publicly rebutted claims amplified by the White House as “unsubstantiated” or “technically incoherent,” Trump fired him over Twitter.
As Congress prepared to vote on certifying the election results, it was members of CISA, along with the FBI, who convinced then-Attorney General Bill Barr that the conspiracy theories embraced by the president could be explained by human error, not systemic fraud or hacking.
When Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, his administration immediately started to dismantle CISA. The administrative notices were sent out just a couple of weeks after the inauguration and included the team in charge of dispelling disinformation.
For the employees under the DOGE microscope, work became impossible, said one former senior CISA employee. “Those groups couldn’t even order a pizza.”
DOGE laid off people critical to the agency’s election work, including those who’d worked closely with states. The Trump administration cut funding for the technology that monitored web and election servers, blinding the federal government to breaches it had detected.
When it came time for states to prepare for the 2026 midterms, CISA had disappeared.
On the evening of July 16, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, dozens of election officials and their staffs gathered for a reception near Mount Rushmore. It was the third night of an annual conference for secretaries of state, drawing participants from red and blue states. They’d spent the week discussing state voter roll maintenance and voter ID — issues that at times made for disagreements.
At about 8 p.m., a wave of discomfort swept through the crowd, visible on attendees’ faces as they glanced frequently at their phones, according to people at the event. Any minute now, Trump was going to address the nation on election security. Some at the reception worried he would declare a national emergency, as his allies had urged him to do months earlier, and use it as a pretext to direct the government to seize voting machines.
Then reports on the speech began rolling in, and the mood shifted. The claims Trump was making were unsubstantiated and outlandish. Many had been examined ad nauseam, including by those at the reception, and roundly debunked. The collective anxiety that was palpable moments earlier melted away, as many saw the speech as another attempt to revive disproved theories unlikely to be taken seriously by most voters.
“Everyone just sort of guffawed and put their phones away and went to the bar,” recalled Quinn Raymond, co-founder of VoteShield, a nonprofit that works with states to help monitor voter registration data, who was at the event.
Still, if the speech made little impact, records published by the Trump administration to support the president’s claims damaged the already eroding relationship between CISA and state election officials. The material included raw information states had shared with the agency that was supposed to remain private, such as a log of communications from Election Day 2020 detailing activity being monitored in several states.
“It betrayed the trust of all partners who were willing to share information at the time,” said Geoff Hale, who worked on CISA’s elections team from the agency’s inception until last year. Now he specializes in election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for digital and civil rights.
Bis, the White House spokesperson, denied that the Trump administration broke any agreements in releasing the information. “The release of such information is exactly the sort of transparency news organizations should applaud,” she said. Bis also defended Trump’s speech, saying it had been fact-checked “by the agencies whose evidence was released and did not mischaracterize any information.”
Hale and others said the speech was one of several instances demonstrating the Trump administration’s reckless attitude toward sensitive data collected by CISA. Earlier this year, Politico reported that acting CISA Director Madhu Gottumukkala had uploaded records to ChatGPT, even though DHS had barred its employees from using the unsecure program. A CISA spokesperson told Politico that Gottumukkala had been permitted to use the technology for a “short-term and limited” basis.
Last May, an independent journalist named Brian Krebs exposed that CISA published private data, including passwords, cloud keys and other information, on its public GitHub page, in a folder labeled “Private-CISA.” A CISA spokesperson told the journalist there was no indication that sensitive data was compromised.
Some state election authorities were also alarmed to see the lengths to which the Trump administration went to legitimize the president’s fixation on the 2020 race.
In fall 2025, Missouri election officials produced a memo stating Andrew McCoy Warner, a Department of Justice official and prominent 2020 election conspiracy theorist, had called several clerks asking for access to voting machines. Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, had also led an operation in Puerto Rico to seize election machines. When the private cybersecurity contractor hired to examine the machines, Mojave Research Inc., failed to find evidence supporting claims about 2020, the federal government became “dissastified” with its services and stopped renewing its contract, its CEO later told reporters.
A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told reporters in August that Mojave’s work ceased because it had completed its contract. Testifying before Congress in March, Gabbard said the seizing of voting machines came at the request of an assistant U.S. attorney in Puerto Rico.
“What happened in the second Trump administration is from almost day one — I mean, literally the first two months — they took all that was built up by Trump 1 and just decimated it,” said David Becker, founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit that works with state election authorities. “Election officials lost trust in the federal government.”
It didn’t help that, in his speech, the president mocked CISA’s defense of the 2020 election, calling the statement about it being the most secure in history a “very pat line” concocted as part of a deep-state cover-up. One former career CISA employee described being crestfallen at the Trump administration’s erosion of all they’d accomplished.
“We worked so hard to build that trusted relationship,” said Caitlin Durkovich, former DHS assistant secretary for infrastructure protection and co-founder of the cybersecurity firm Civira Partners. “I don’t know how you put it back together.”
A few weeks after Trump’s speech, the state election officials gathered once more, this time for a video call with Nick Andersen, who had replaced Gottumukkala as CISA’s acting director.
Though the primaries were already under way, this was the first time many had met Andersen, a former cybersecurity adviser to Trump’s White House who had joined CISA a year earlier. Andersen is also a district representative for the Republican Party in Virginia, according to the party’s website. In March, he gave a speech to the Fairfax GOP chapter titled “Fighting Democrat Redistricting.”
Speaking over video in August, the boyish-faced former Marine Corps engineer announced that DHS was preparing to release a plan on how it would work together with state officials to secure the election, according to five people who were present at the video meeting, some of whom shared notes with ProPublica.
Many on the call were stunned at what they perceived as a lack of understanding of election planning. Early voting for the general election was just around the corner. They had spent over a year preparing for the midterms, and there was no more time for ambitious work.
Some peppered Andersen with questions: Where had CISA been when there was still time to make improvements?
Andersen blamed any lapses or perceived breaches in trust on the federal government shutdown in fall 2025, twirling his pen uncomfortably and sipping from a Monster energy drink.
Fontes, Arizona’s secretary of state, was blunt about his feelings regarding working with Andersen and CISA, according to several of the people on the call.
“I told him I didn’t trust him,” Fontes recalled in an interview. “I did raise my voice a little bit, because I’m frustrated — very frustrated — that they would have the temerity to come in, clear the entire deck of competent professionals, stop supporting the states, eviscerate the coordination efforts that they had and then suddenly come in and say: ‘Oh, we’re from the federal government. We’re here to help.’”
Indeed, one recently departed CISA official said attempting to do the agency’s typical election work now would be futile. In previous years, CISA had finished almost all its preparations with the states by Labor Day.
“That ship has sailed,” the official said.
CISA published its security plan for the 2026 election on Sept. 24. The 13-page document describes how, over the past two years, CISA has “recommitted to its statutory mission and remains resolute in strengthening the security of elections.”
State officials said their planning will ensure a secure election, even without help from CISA. Yet they and cybersecurity experts worry that Trump will say the election was hacked if Republicans don’t win in November.
The security plan calls for “leveraging collaborative partnerships” with states the agency has abandoned since Trump took office. Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, said she’d welcome that but was skeptical of the agency’s motivations.
“For CISA to promise election officials now, at this point in time, that they are going to be a resource for the 2026 election is too little, too late,” she said.
Canada and the EU want a much closer relationship — but they still disagree over what that relationship actually is.
Zoya Sheftalovich and Nick Vinocur look ahead to this week’s EU-Canada summit in Montreal, where leaders are still negotiating the language, the label and the practical deliverables.
Then, Ukraine’s growing financing needs are colliding with the fight over the EU’s next seven-year budget, as some countries resist taking part in another common loan.
And finally, Brussels’ battle over meat-related names takes an unexpected turn — with bacon-flavoured crisps caught in the crossfire.
If you have a question or comment, don’t hesitate! Message us on our WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29.
LONDON — Andy Burnham pledged to bring back hope when he entered Downing Street. Labour MPs are feeling it — for now.
The British prime minister is approaching 100 days in No. 10 this week with his party believing things are on the up.
Keir Starmer was toppled earlier this year after disastrous local election results precipitated a loss of confidence in his administration.
Disgruntled Labour MPs warned their new leader must show up, listen to them and accept some disagreement to avoid repeating his predecessor’s mistakes.
POLITICO sets out the four reasons Labour MPs are feeling more chipper under Burnham — but they still see potential pitfalls ahead.
Some of the dozen parliamentarians interviewed by POLITICO for this piece were granted anonymity to speak candidly about the internal party matters.
1) Disagreement is tolerated
MPs reckon Burnham’s administration is more willing to recognize different views within the broad church Labour Party.
Burnham himself told a Parliamentary Labour Party meeting that disagreement is fine as long as MPs speak to him about it, according to Simon Opher — a 2024-intake MP and member of Mainstream, the soft-left faction supported by Burnham when he was Greater Manchester mayor.
“It sounds weird, but that is a remarkable difference from what they had before,” Opher said, claiming he felt a “slight climate of fear” early in his political career.
Starmer infuriated MPs when weeks after taking office he suspended the whip from those who voted to scrap a two-child benefit cap — only to U-turn earlier this year.
By contrast, Kim Johnson, a member of Labour’s left-wing Socialist Campaign Group faction, points out she wasn’t sanctioned after abstaining on the government’s Courts and Tribunals Bill earlier this month because she believes it still weakens the right to trial by jury.
“You’re not feeling you can’t do that or risk losing the whip,” she said.
Burnham’s eyes are photographed as he delivers a speech at the Labour Conference in Liverpool on Sept. 29, 2026. | Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images
Of course, Burnham’s appetite for disagreement hasn’t been fully put to the test.
He entered No. 10 at the start of the summer recess, when MPs were away from Westminster, and there was a month-long conference recess when they returned to SW1 in September.
And MPs don’t want a totally laissez-faire regime.
“I didn’t get into politics to sit in a room and just agree with each other,” said another 2024-intake Labour MP. “I don’t think you get good policy by just sitting around like nodding dogs.”
But they said they “genuinely believe in collective responsibility,” and are “quite relaxed” about the consequences of voting against the whip.
Another backbench MP warns Burnham’s lax approach can only last so long.
“Andy is riding high still, he is not in [Nigel] Farage or [Zack] Polanski territory, he can afford for people to go ‘I don’t like this.’ It’s when the shit hits the fan, and the public are saying they’re not happy, then you begin to find the political patience wears out,” that backbencher added.
Burnham may yet regret his promise that the whips office will act as an HR department, the MP said, “because you want them to come down like a clonking fist.”
2) Ministers are more visible
Burnham’s team is making itself seen, his MPs report.
Whips have been calling them to check in, and Burnham himself has attended PLP sub-group meetings. Cabinet ministers have also been available for meetings.
Though another Socialist Campaign Group MP admitted “it’s a very low bar” for improvement. “Under Starmer, there was very little in terms of consultations, any discussions about anything at all.”
Mainstream member Alex Sobel said: “I’ve had more meetings with No. 10 — I’ve been to No. 10 North — in these three months than the entire time of the previous administration.”
One MP said: “People feel warmly towards Andy, which is half the battle. I think they trust his good intentions.” | Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images
Bill Esterson, who chairs the Energy Security Committee, said he had “regular conversations with No. 10” and that Burnham’s team had “engaged very fully” with committee chairs and the PLP more broadly.
A second 2024 intake MP said: “There’s definitely more of a concerted attempt for them to be reaching out and listening to us.” The days of being viewed “as the legal necessity to get legislation through” are over.
3) Burnham’s political instincts
MPs reckon they’ve had an upgrade when it comes to raw political instincts.
“There’s a feeling that we’ve got a guy up front who we can get behind,” said Opher.
“He understands how politics works,” he added, citing the decision to delay approval for drilling at the Jackdaw gas field until after the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, where Labour faced a challenge from the Greens. “Andy’s much more savvy on what he’s doing.”
Backbenchers also claim to feel more confident they won’t get caught in the Starmer flip-flop policy trap.
The unnamed Socialist Campaign Group MP quoted above is still smarting over the “absolutely awful” two-child benefit cap vote, where rebels lost the whip only for it later to become government policy.
The first 2024-intake MP reckons Burnham is better able to communicate difficult trade-offs, like alteringthe triple lock to fund social care.
4) Voters are giving Labour another chance
It is ultimately Burnham’s popularity with the public that has fed into the positive mood.
Many Labour MPs “agreed with the punters on the doorstep” about Starmer’s inadequacies, Opher said. Data showing Labour has retaken the opinion poll lead from Reform UK has boosted their optimism. “It doesn’t feel like a party that is about to be ripped apart,” he added.
The first 2024 intake MP said: “It has given us the right to be heard,” said the first 2024-intake Labour MP quoted above. “People feel warmly towards Andy, which is half the battle. I think they trust his good intentions.”
MPs say Burnham’s administration is willing to recognize different views within the Labour Party. | Leon Neal/Getty Images
Some flashpoints ahead…
1) The budget
Burnham can only coast on the good vibes for so long, and the first test of tough political choices comes Wednesday in the budget.
MPs on the left see the economic statement as a “crunch point” that will show if the chancellor will put his money where the PM’s mouth is.
“If there’s an attempt to take money from ordinary people who’ve got nothing and no attempt to get finances from people who have got far too much, then probably there will be some sort of opposition”, said the unnamed Socialist Campaign Group MP previously quoted. They hope to see the already trailed bank tax confirmed, or a wealth tax.
They warned that any decisions on what to cut and where to spend will pose “challenges from both sides of the PLP.”
“The measure of Andy Burnham is how he deals with it,” they added.
2) Welfare
Burnham wants to avoid a repeat of the botched attempt at welfare reform which severely weakened Starmer’s authority.
A long-awaited review by former Cabinet minister Alan Milburn into young people not in education, employment or training (NEETs) will be published shortly with recommendations.
Milburn — alongside Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden — has been trying to ensure communication is better.
“Pat has done an excellent job at building a consensus, rolling the carpet, setting out the argument, setting out the moral case, but he was doing that before the change of administration,” a third 2024-intake Labour MP said.
The second 2024 Labour MP quoted above said most colleagues “feel like it’s a decent stab at it and it’s not come out of the blue.” Reasonable critics “were just getting stonewalled” last year.
Esterson, who’s served in parliament since 2010, said regular engagement means “it’s not surprising that you get the benefit of the doubt far more often than if you don’t.”
3) Europe
Burnham’s admission that a future Labour manifesto could commit to a referendum on EU membership is already opening old Brexit wounds — and not in the way Labour wants.
The Socialist Campaign Group MP previously quoted is uneasy about its potential to spark further division. “It nearly ripped the country apart and I’m not sure if it’s the right thing to do [to] reignite that horribleness in each constituency,” they said.
The third 2024-intake Labour MP quoted above concurred. While people want a closer relationship with Europe, they believe rejoining is a “different kettle of fish” and jars with constituents who want “better public services and more economic growth” rather than continental renegotiations.
4) Energy
Energy policy has already become a flashpoint. The decision to approve the Jackdaw gas field was met with some dissent. A decision about the larger Rosebank oil and gas field is still looming.
Sobel told POLITICO’s London Playbook it “won’t make an impact on global prices and will give mixed messages in terms of investment in terms of both renewables and decarbonisation of home heating.”
Left-wing Labour MPs also signed a letter to Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh urging her to reject the licenses due to climate change. “Every second we continue pumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere makes the crisis more severe,” the letter organized by Chris Hinchliff said.
The second 2024-intake MP quoted thought ministers are acting in good faith.
“They’ve got one go at government and they seem to be doing their absolute best to give it a good whack,” they said.
ORLEANS, France — Far-right leader Marine Le Pen shed her anti-establishment radicalism on Sunday to portray herself as the guardian of France in her first presidential campaign rally in Orléans, south of Paris.
With polls showing her as the front-runner ahead of the scheduled April 2027 presidential election, Le Pen sought to reassure voters by promising to safeguard France as the country seethes with social unrest and stares down a looming debt crisis.
“Even if today the words that spring to mind are ruin, decline … riots and even chaos … we believe in our people and in France,” she said.
In a speech lasting over an hour, Le Pen told thousands of supporters that she was not aiming for a “revolution” but rather “a real change in power” that would spark a new “Renaissance” in the country.
“We’re not saying: It was better before,” she said. “We say: It was good before and it will be better tomorrow.”
Le Pen also played her usual refrains, promising to restore public order in France, strengthen the country’s borders and expel undocumented migrants if she came to power.
Le Pen and her allies have spent days pushing back against accusations by rivals that the far-right National Rally has helped deepen divisions in France amid the turmoil and disorder sparked by recent student protests. In her address, the four-time presidential candidate refrained from attacking political opponents and pitched her party as the one offering French citizens a brighter future.
“My protective vision will benefit all,” she said.
The eurozone’s second-largest economy is facing a cocktail of crises including cost-of-living protests, difficulties adopting a state budget and a spiraling debt and deficit. The dire situation has spooked the markets, with France’s borrowing costs climbing above 5% last week for the first time since 2002.
According to a senior National Rally official, Le Pen wanted to use her speech to cast herself in a presidential role and to reassure voters hesitant about supporting her. “People mostly agree with our ideas, but some still think it’s a gamble to vote for us,” the official said.
Tensions overflowing
Le Pen’s rally was also a show of force, with over 8,500 supporters gathering in a conference hall in Orléans, many carrying French flags and chanting “Marine, présidente!”
According to POLITICO’s most recent Poll of Polls from mid-October, if the election were held today Le Pen would get 34% of the vote compared to 16% for center-right candidate Edouard Philippe and 15% for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, representing the far left. Most polls have Le Pen winning in a run-off round if no candidate wins a majority in the first round.
Supporters wave French flags during Launch rally for Marine Le Pen’s presidential campaign as part of the Congress of the Far-right party Rassemblement National in Orléans on October 25, 2026. | Romain Perrocheau/AFP via Getty Images
Leaders of the far-right party staged a two-day conference in Orléans over the weekend under high security, with heightened police checks and body searches. On Saturday thousands of left-wing demonstrators gathered to oppose the rise of the far right in the center of Paris, while across the country protests attracted hundreds of thousands of people, a week after looting and riots marred rallies across France.
“France is plunging into real violence, which will become out of control if the state doesn’t take control,” said National Rally President Jordan Bardella, addressing the crowd before Le Pen’s speech.
“The National Rally appears to be the only solution to allow the return of order and return of authority.”
France was already reeling after a man randomly opened fire on passers-by in the Paris suburb of Trappes on Friday, killing one person and injuring five, including a girl of 12. French President Emmanuel Macron deplored the incident as “a racist terrorist attack.”
Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure said on Sunday that the National Rally carried “a heavy responsibility” for the Trappes attack because it had created “a mood … suggesting that we are being invaded, that there’s a sort of great replacement.”
The National Rally pushed back on the charges, and instead accused the far left of encouraging the violence.
Canada and Europe want to reshape the global order. But whose vision will prevail?
Mark Carney’s push for a middle-powers alliance meets Ursula von der Leyen’s bid for influence.
By ZI-ANN LUM, SEBASTIAN STARCEVIC and CAMILLE GIJS
Illustration by Natália Delgado/POLITICO
Mark Carney’s pursuit of a global alliance of middle powers has a Europe problem.
Canada’s prime minister wants to help build a new world order that can counterbalance the power of the United States and China. But his vision depends on a new relationship with a Europe that doesn’t see itself as a middle power at all.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has a different vision: a Brussels-centered bloc that extends the EU’s economic and geopolitical influence, starting with Canada. The idea, according to senior European lawmaker Siegfried Mureșan, is to create an opportunity for the EU to become the “global center of gravity for liberal democracies.”
The competing visions will be tested this week when Carney and von der Leyen meet in Montreal for a summit intended to chart a new course for transatlantic relations. Both want to demonstrate they can prosper in a world upended by U.S. President Donald Trump. But they have different ideas about their curious new alliance — and face political resistance that could limit how far the partnership can go.
Von der Leyen’s offer of “associate membership” in the EU surprised officials on both sides of the Atlantic. Four diplomats told POLITICO they were not consulted before she floated the idea in the State of the Union. The officials added that they don’t understand the label, which has yet to be defined. Germany has since led pushback on the plan.
“We’ve definitely put the cart before the horse,” one of the diplomats said. “We’re announcing something and then figuring out how to flesh it out.”
Trump called the membership idea “laughable,” but also threatened “very serious tariffs” should it come to be — a reminder that leaders in pursuit of Washington workarounds must avoid provoking the White House.
The leaders are under pressure to leave Montreal with more than a liberal democratic photo-op. For starters, they need to decide what “associate membership” means — and disarm resistance in the EU capitals blindsided by von der Leyen’s plan.
Canada’s Ambassador to the EU Jonathan Wilkinson told POLITICO last month that people got too hung up on a label that was revealed prematurely. Carney called the Canada-EU relationship an “alliance for the future” when he addressed European lawmakers in Strasbourg.
Wilkinson said the Canada-EU project will show other democratic nations how to deepen partnerships. “It ties into very much what [Carney] talked about at Davos — and after Davos.”
Carney, von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa have two days to chart what’s next while American foreign policy continues to stress test geopolitical relationships in midterm campaigns that will shape Trump’s last two years in office.
The economic divide
Ottawa considers the EU an obvious partner in its push to diversify trade away from the U.S. There’s already a free-trade agreement that both sides view as being underutilized.
Leaders gathering in Montreal this week will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Canadian-EU trade agreement, nicknamed CETA. But nine EU member countries have yet to ratify the deal, underscoring the challenge of turning rhetoric into reality.
“We have shared challenges and many more shared opportunities,” Canadian International Trade Minister Maninder Sidhu told reporters last week in Dublin, where he was invited to participate in an informal meeting of EU trade ministers, a preview of what a more integrated Canada could look like. “Canada wants to be Europe’s most reliable partner.”
Sidhu said CETA utilization rates in EU member countries range from 60% to 80%, making a point about room for improvement and perennial challenges. “We know there’s room to grow.”
Von der Leyen’s associate membership plan “has been coldly received by member states,” a senior EU official said. “It [the summit] is more about what we do, how we can use the real potential of the CETA agreement.” CETAhas been provisionally in force since 2017.
Trade talks between Canada and the bloc read like a lengthy transatlantic grievance list.
At a meeting between Brussels and Ottawa last October, the EU complained about Canadian taxes it says disproportionately hit European carmakers, opaque cheese-import quotas, cumbersome rules on cosmetics and what it considers discriminatory provincial taxes and markups on European wines and spirits.
Canada, meanwhile, warned that the EU’s deforestation rules could burden its exporters, questioned the impact of Brussels’ carbon border tax and pressed for greater recognition of Canadian standards in areas including AI.
The senior EU official described the relationship as constrained by “irritants and unfulfilled promises” that must be resolved if the two sides are to make progress.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney shakes hands with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, next to European Parliament President Roberta Metsola, in Strasbourg, eastern France, on September 17, 2026. | Jean-Christophe Verhaegen/ AFP via Getty Images
There are hurdles ahead. Even as Canada and the EU imagine a deeper economic and security partnership, both are pursuing industrial policies that could shut the other’s companies out of lucrative public contracts — death by compounded trade barriers.
Brussels has concerns about Ottawa’s “Buy Canadian” initiatives and their compatibility with the EU-Canada free trade agreement. “Some member states didn’t like the ‘Buy Canada’ thing from Carney,” the official added.
Canada is likewise uncertain whether its companies will qualify for the EU’s proposed “Made in Europe” preferences foreseen in a major industry bill that would seek to channel public procurement spending to European companies. The EU is divided over whether to extend those preferences to trusted trading partners, a topic that is expected to come up in Montreal.
Canadian business leaders recognize the domestic appeal of “Buy Canadian” in the face of Trump’s threats, but warn there will need to be concessions.
“It’s something that will have to be resolved in order to move the relationship deeper, particularly with respect to industrial cooperation or collaboration,” Mark Camilleri, president of the Canada EU Trade and Investment Association, told POLITICO.
Camilleri likened the 10-year-old CETA deal to a garden overgrown with weeds. “It pains me to see market access being eroded through Canadian and European preferences,” he said.
Pressure is on
European and Canadian leaders are under pressure to deliver wins this week that demonstrate that “non-hegemons” — a descriptor Carney used in his Davos speech — can survive and thrive in an age of great-power rivalry.
Canadians currently support closer ties with Europe. But the EU faces political headwinds of its own, from fraught budget negotiations within the bloc to right-wing populist movements that are picking up momentum in some of its biggest economies.
One likely deliverable is a new digital trade agreement. Talks launched in March and were still underway last week. But the agreement lacks substantive text on artificial intelligence, leaving the two sides to find other places to cooperate, potentially through the EU’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act. That proposal seeks to reduce reliance on U.S. tech giants, raising the risk of a new row with Washington.
The European Commission is also pushing for Canada to join Erasmus+, the bloc’s student exchange program, according to one EU official. Carney has already publicly expressed interest.
But Brussels has bigger ambitions for the partnership. The EU is pressing Canada to increase its funding for Ukraine, a test of Canada’s willingness to take on more of the security burden.
For von der Leyen, securing that commitment would be a win. So would leaving the summit with a pledge from Carney to explore her offer of an “associate membership” — or whatever they end up calling it.
Zi-Ann Lum reported from Toronto, Sebastian Starcevic from Brussels and Camille Gijs from Dublin.
Brennende Mülltonnen, verbarrikadierte Schaufenster und eine unübersichtliche Mischung aus Gelbwesten, Anarchisten und Banlieue-Jugendlichen auf den Straßen. Was als Schülerprotest in Frankreich begann, hat sich an steigenden Energiepreisen zu einer radikalen Bewegung entzündet. Präsident Emmanuel Macron verliert zunehmend die Kontrolle und wirkt in der Krise wie ein Pilot ohne Cockpit.
Inmitten der Eskalation positioniert sich Marine Le Pen geschickt als Kandidatin der Ordnung, während die politische Mitte zerbröselt und eine erdrückende Staatsverschuldung den Handlungsspielraum raubt.
Was ein möglicher Rechtsruck für die europäische Sicherheitsarchitektur und das ohnehin angespannte deutsch-französische Verhältnis bedeutet, analysiert Welt-Korrespondentin Martina Meister im Gespräch mit Rixa Fürsen.
Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.
Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren.
POLITICO Deutschland – ein Angebot der Axel Springer Deutschland GmbH Axel-Springer-Straße 65, 10888 Berlin Tel: +49 (30) 2591 0 information@axelspringer.de Sitz: Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg, HRB 196159 B USt-IdNr: DE 214 852 390 Geschäftsführer: Christoph Eck-Schmidt, Carolin Hulshoff Pol, Mathias Sanchez Luna
POLITISCHE WERBUNG
**(Anzeige) Eine Nachricht der PKV:Wir sind die Besser-für-alle-Versicherung. Warum? Weil wir als private Krankenversicherung die medizinische Versorgung stärken, nachfolgende Generationen entlasten und den medizinischen Fortschritt beschleunigen. Das kommt allen Menschen in Deutschland zugute, auch den gesetzlich Versicherten. Mehr auf PKV.de**
Sponsor: Verband der Privaten Krankenversicherung
Diese Werbung steht im Zusammenhang mit der Debatte über Belastungen der privat Pflegeversicherten zugunsten der sozialen Pflegepflichtversicherung (SPV).
Two critical bugs in the PHP web programming language, used by the majority of the internet, threatened to upend the internet — and it's unlikely to be the last major software scare.
The exposure was immense, with AI multiplying the risks — and yet time-tested global cybersecurity procedures appeared to be functioning. Then suddenly, it all broke down.
The decision by a cybersecurity company on Wednesday to prematurely release information about a flaw in the popular PHP computer programming language left much of the web exposed to hackers, triggering a panic that brought to life months of warnings of how the AI-powered era could cause widespread damage.
The flaws in PHP, discovered using AI tools through a months-long process coordinated by OpenAI, caused cyber agencies across Europe, the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Canada to post urgent warnings Wednesday. Numerous governments took websites offline as a precaution.
While no major hacking damage was immediately apparent, the way the incident unfolded over 72 hours showed how easily cybersecurity processes can break down and the outsized consequences of cyber risks in the AI era.
The man who set off the chain reaction with the early release — Chainguard’s CEO Dan Lorenc — quickly apologized in a LinkedIn post. But on Thursday, in an interview with POLITICO, Lorenc said he’d shared the information ahead of time because the flaw was already being exploited. Though others disputed that, Lorenc said he believed he’d seen enough evidence to invalidate an embargo set up to allow time to find a fix for the flaws.
While he disputed that his actions would have caused problems for other defenders, Lorenc conceded that the evidential threshold in these coordinated cyber defense systems is a “grey area.”
The revelation of the PHP flaw brings out into the open what cyber officials have been bracing for since the arrival of the most powerful tools of artificial intelligence, which not only can be used to discover vulnerabilities but also to exploit them at scale.
The cybersecurity world’s long-established protocols helped prevent disaster scenarios, in which hackers would have successfully exploited the vulnerabilities to take control of numerous websites and access their data. But now the scale and end-of-days potential of AI-driven cyber risks are visible for the world to see.
This “is what happens when AI turns up a flaw that’s been hiding for years,” said Eylam Milner, co-founder and chief technology officer at cybersecurity start-up Echo. The vulnerabilities, he added, are “about as serious as it gets for the web.”
Origin story
Understanding how this week’s emergency unfolded offers a glimpse at how companies and authorities are working to stave off attacks — and how much risk they face going forward.
The origins of the incident can be traced back as far as April when top frontier AI firm Anthropic unveiled Mythos, leading some in the cybersecurity world to worry that systems would quickly be overrun by advanced artificial intelligence, with potential for catastrophic events to ensue.
But while researchers did find more flaws in computer systems in the months after Anthropic and other AI firms like OpenAI released those models, they had little impact in the real world. Even the Hugging Face incident, a widely discussed hack that saw OpenAI’s autonomous AI agents go rogue during an internal security evaluation, related more to the level of control AI companies exert over their models than their power to break into systems worldwide.
A figurine is pictured in front of the Anthropic logo in Paris on Feb. 13, 2026. | Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images
That changed this week after researchers unveiled the vulnerability in PHP, a coding language estimated to be integrated into some 70% of the web.
The process by which information about flaws is released among cybersecurity officials and affiliated companies is crucial. Through a longstanding practice known as coordinated disclosure, researchers and companies that identify flaws can find a fix and share it confidentially with agencies and others before releasing to the public, meaning they don’t hand malicious hackers the gift of a hole without a fix.
In the case of the PHP flaw, that process worked well, but not perfectly. Information about the bugs started to circulate ahead of the planned release time. Then, according to the PHP Foundation, Chainguard “unilaterally broke the embargo,” which “disregarded weeks of work by many parties toward a coordinated disclosure.” PHP Foundation executive director Elizabeth Barron told POLITICO by email that while it was “disappointed” with Chainguard, it hopes to “rebuild trust with them in the future to ensure we can continue to collaborate effectively.”
After the leak— which meant information about the bugs was in the open before the fix was ready — confusion quickly ensued, with government bodies and private companies choosing to temporarily shut down their websites rather than risk potentially damaging breaches to their data and the sites themselves.
Early Thursday, Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, an internet services company that is widely used by websites to block cyberattacks, giving it a high level of visibility over what hackers are doing, said in a post on X that it had seen “millions” of attempts to exploit the flaw.
Cloudflare saw thousands in the 10 hours before the flaw was publicly announced, then tens of thousands in the 45 minutes after the announcement, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and now millions, Prince said.
Amazon’s cloud division also said the flaw is “now being broadly exploited in the wild.”
One senior U.S. government cyber official said that federal authorities have been overwhelmed — and not just by PHP. The same day the world was racing to address PHP, they were also dealing with bugs in node.js, a widely used JavaScript framework, Fortinet, GitHub and Oracle.
“The fire department is fighting multiple fires at once,” the official said, adding: “The good news is they’re all one-story structures on fire, which the fire department deals with all day, every day.”
Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, speaks during the Semafor World Economy conference in Washington, on April 17, 2026. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
More to come
Dauntingly, OpenAI said there’s more on the way. “These bugs are among several significant vulnerabilities we’ve already found and are working to fix, and we expect similar findings to increase sharply in the coming months,” the company said Wednesday in a statement.
Matthijs van Amelsfort, head of the Dutch cybersecurity agency, said in an interview that the job of keeping computer systems safe has been transformed by the advancement of AI. “As soon as the frontier models came out, that’s exactly what we said, this will be the trend,” he said. “And actually that’s happening now.”
Thomas Caspers, vice president of Germany’s cyber agency BSI, concurred: “We expect that [to be] happening more and more during the coming months.”
AI also ramps up the risks once the flaws are out in the open. Cyber agencies’ recommendation that organizations take their websites offline was “really a drastic measure,” Caspers said. “We wouldn’t have done that a few years ago or so.” But because AI has made it quicker and easier to exploit flaws, “we had to do that,” he said.
At the same time, the use of advanced AI to detect the flaws may create a new level of protection against malicious hackers looking to take advantage of them. Caspers said that though his German agency has also seen attacks, it has not seen any successful use of the flaw by hackers.
“It seems a little bit more complicated than expected to exploit,” he said.
Despite the fact that AI offers a new way to discover flaws, the work involved in keeping systems protected is more quotidian, with cyber agencies urging organizations to install the fix shared by the PHP Foundation, in a process known as patching.
“There are three things that you have to do right now,” said van Amelsfort from the Dutch agency. “And that’s patch, patch, and patch.”
Login
