If a mid-1980s dystopian sci-fi action movie mentioned in its opening crawl that in the year 2026, school buses would be equipped with artificial intelligence that automatically tickets drivers who don’t stop when the bus’s stop sign pops out from the side, we would now be praising the coked-out, thrice-divorced screenwriter who came up with it as some kind of visionary. Here we are in 2026, and around 35,000 buses spread across 24 states are doing exactly that.

According to reporting from TechSpot, based on a Bloomberg/Type Investigations report from earlier this year, surveillance company BusPatrol and its competitors like Verra Mobility and AngelTrax are turning America’s classic, wholesome yellow school buses into a mobile automated fleet of traffic cops. The idea is a valiant one, one that hardly anyone would argue against: prevent kids from getting hit by reckless drivers who go when kids are being released at a bus stop. And at zero cost to local taxpayers, no less.

Except the revenue-sharing model looks a whole lot like a private cash grab. In Montgomery County, Maryland, BusPatrol generated $92 million across 375,000 tickets. The county walked away with $18.5 million, while BusPatrol pocketed roughly $40 million. But, hey, at least it works, right?

AI-Powered School Buses Are Issuing Millions in Traffic Tickets. Here’s How It Works.

That’s debatable, since the only data we have on the viability of these systems as a deterrent comes from the companies themselves, who obviously have a vested interest in claiming their products work and keep kids safe. The Type Investigations report found that while bus patrol touted the wonders of its system, county records didn’t reflect a decline in bus stop collisions.

All this brings up an awkward hypocrisy in our modern surveillance era. People collectively lose their minds over Flock cameras in their neighborhoods and its license-plate-reading AI. We don’t want cops tapping into those camera networks. So where is all the fuss over BusPatrol and its ilk?

Is there any meaningful difference between a Flock camera and letting a private corporation turn public school buses into multimillion-dollar automated ticketing machines when it all reaches the same conclusion—living in an automated police state we once claimed to despise? Or are we cool with it, because it’s to “protect the children.”

The post School Buses Are Using AI to Ticket Drivers, and Private Companies Are Making Millions appeared first on VICE.

TORONTO — When a company is building technology that could totally transform the world — technology so high-stakes and secretive that it may underpin the future of geopolitics — you might expect its leaders to have a handle on the basics of security.

Basics like, say, not having an extramarital affair with an alleged Chinese spy. Basics like not selling the tech to someone who may help smuggle it to a top foreign adversary. 

Instead America got Jensen Huang, the CEO of AI chipmaker Nvidia, who resigned Thursday after admitting that he’d had just such an affair. The woman in question, Alice Huang, worked for a company called Megaspeed, which was buying billions of dollars’ worth of chips from Nvidia. Megaspeed is under investigation for allegedly smuggling chips into China.

The spy scandal raises serious questions about security in the AI corporate world. How is it possible that an alleged Chinese spy so easily embedded into Nvidia, one of the world’s most valuable companies and a huge strategic asset to America in the global AI race?

What’s even more disturbing, however, is that Nvidia is just the tip of the iceberg. 

In fact, just as the Huang story was breaking, some of the world’s top AI researchers were gathered in Toronto for the Hinton Lectures, where “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton was hosting AI alignment pioneer Paul Christiano for a series of talks. I was in attendance and, strikingly, I didn’t hear Huang’s scandal mentioned once. The focus was on how the frontier AI companies are racing ahead on building this incredibly powerful technology even though they can’t keep it safe or secure it. For months now, OpenAI and Anthropic have been having their own embarrassing security problems, including corporate espionage and cyber breaches. 

“We are not able to adequately secure AI developments,” Christiano, who recently joined the OpenAI nonprofit board, bluntly acknowledged at the event. “We need to be able to defend models and algorithms from theft.”

Ironically, national security is a big part of the large AI companies’ rationale for how they operate in the first place. OpenAI and Anthropic, backed by White House policy, both justify their blistering speed in the AI race by saying that the US can’t afford to let China win. And Anthropic recently justified heavily redacting a key independent report on its AI progress by claiming that it can’t afford to let China glean its secrets.

But that may be the equivalent of worrying that you’ve left the window open a crack when your front door is swinging wide open. 

“I’m frustrated with a lot of the companies because they simultaneously use security as an all-purpose cudgel with which to withhold information — even information that’s very much in the public interest to know — and yet they have terrible security,” Daniel Kokotajlo, a former researcher at OpenAI who became a prominent whistleblower, told me. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

While the story of Huang’s affair has fired up imaginations, the real lesson to be taken from his spectacular downfall is not that he was uniquely weak on security, but that he was remarkably similar to the other big players in AI. They are asking the world to trust them as they claim to be building a machine god — and, in the case of Anthropic, chasing a $1.4 trillion IPO on that basis — yet they haven’t gotten ahold of basic security.

Are OpenAI and Anthropic practically giving away their secrets due to bad security?

OpenAI revealed last month that it had found a recording device in a conference room where sensitive discussions take place. Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi national working as an engineer at OpenAI, is alleged to have plugged the recorder into the USB port of a television and simply wrapped it in toilet paper. Another recorder was found in a bag in another room. Questions about how to build a device that records continuously and encrypt data also showed up on his spouse’s chatbot account. 

“At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data,” OpenAI said last month, adding, “Our security program is designed to protect against a wide range of threat actors, from insider risks to cybercriminals to nation states.”

But the incident was worrisome. Alfozan had been working at OpenAI since June 2025. The recording device was sitting in that conference room for a couple of days before OpenAI discovered it. Maybe Alfozan wasn’t sophisticated enough to steal model weights — the billions of numbers that shape how an AI system turns input into output — but what if he’d been just slightly more careful or clever?

OpenAI has also had security weaknesses of a different kind — and no, it’s not just this summer’s notorious Hugging Face incident. Of the ones we know about (sometimes these are only revealed later), a recent example stands out: A group of “white-hat” hackers, who aim to find vulnerabilities but not to do a company harm, discovered a way to access OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts, where sensitive research is potentially being done. The whole operation took just 72 hours.

Over at Anthropic, a group of ex-DOGE staffers who founded an AI startup called Cathedral managed to breach Anthropic’s internal systems in under 12 hours. They reportedly accessed the company’s Slack, where employees trade messages discussing the company’s state-of-the-art models, as well as meeting transcripts. 

“My guess would be that the Slack would contain enough information to get a good sense of what the company is doing and how they’re training their AIs — basically, the juicy secrets would be there,” Kokotajlo told me. “And I would say getting the algorithmic secrets is like 80 percent as good as getting everything, including the model weights.”

Alleged spies (like Alice Huang or Abdulrahman Alfozan) and cyber breaches (like those targeting OpenAI and Anthropic) are obviously different types of security issues that demand very different types of internal controls. But for Kokotajlo and others, it makes sense to think of them all under the same umbrella — weak security. And it all points to a trend that seems common among the most powerful AI companies: They’re prioritizing rapid technological advancement over the perhaps more boring and slower process of ensuring their work is secure. 

“They show that the companies are very far from having security adequate to protect themselves from a well-resourced state actor,” Kokotajlo said, adding: “If China wants to get the stuff, China will get the stuff.”

This is all happening against the backdrop of China’s aggressive distillation of US models, which involves training a new model on the output of a more advanced one. It’s a way to gain powerful capabilities without having to incur the real cost — a bit like cheating on a test by copying off a better student. For example, Anthropic found that the Chinese lab DeepSeek has been using Claude to improve its models, which is not a breach per se but illustrates how vigorously China is taking advantage of American companies’ research.

Kokotajlo also emphasized that there’s another bucket of security incidents we should be worried about: the hacks perpetrated against companies by their own misaligned AI models. Many people forget that in the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI agents didn’t only hack into Hugging Face — OpenAI’s own systems were breached, too. The sandbox meant to contain the agents was far from airtight, and they broke out. 

“You should consider the AIs as an insider threat,” Kokotajlo said. “And it doesn’t feel like these companies have that locked down very well either.”

The top AI companies can’t keep using the security practices of a startup

There are three main reasons why security at the frontier AI companies hasn’t been up to snuff, according to David Robinson, who led transparency work for OpenAI’s safety team until he left in September.

One is the fact that the companies are building AI agents so capable that it can be genuinely hard — even for their creators — to keep them from doing damage. “We’re training systems to be good at conducting attacks of the kind that the labs internally are now also trying to defend against,” Robinson told me. “That is a challenging situation.”

There’s also a cultural problem. “If you look back with 20/20 hindsight at the Hugging Face incident, it’s clear that at the time OpenAI had underinvested in cybersecurity controls, and I think part of the reason for this was that there’s a [higher] level of cachet associated with working on alignment,” or the problem of how to get AIs to do what humans want them to do, Robinson said. “Some of the day-to-day practical questions about our cybersecurity posture — even though the people working on those questions are extremely good — I think it was not the same kind of organizational priority as it needed to be.”

Finally, there’s the fact that market incentives push AI companies to race ahead on developing the tech as fast as they can.

“Time pressure on the company,” Robinson said, “made it very difficult to be sufficiently careful.” And although researchers still at OpenAI now say the company has gotten dramatically better on security, Robinson noted that those competitive pressures “continue to exist.”

This is a well-documented trend at the company. “OpenAI’s security seems to be about what you’d expect from a research lab that scaled at a blistering pace over four years and focused more on beating its competitors than securing its infrastructure,” Joshua Saxe, the chief technology officer of the AI security firm Abundant Security, told the New York Times after the Hugging Face incident.

OpenAI itself has implicitly acknowledged that improving security measures sometimes comes “at the cost of research velocity,” as it wrote in a public memo after the incident. 

But if a company cuts corners on security, it can’t ultimately protect its lead over others. If anything, it just ends up helping its adversaries race against it even faster. 

As Kokotajlo and his colleagues at the AI Futures Project recently warned when writing about the companies’ quest to build a superhuman AI researcher (SAR), an AI that’s as good as the top human researcher: “If we train SAR in the immediate future, the algorithms will probably leak to China, and maybe the model weights too. AI companies have very poor security right now, and so we are on track for SAR leaking to China.”

And it’s not just that poor security can make it self-defeating for American companies to keep racing forward. Their security weakness could also make it harder for them to slow down even if they themselves want to. 

In his lecture this week in Toronto, Christiano asked all of us in the audience to imagine a scenario that he said currently looks likely: We arrive at a point when further progress on AI seems risky. There’s a demand in the US to slow down. But there’s also a high probability that the AI models or algorithms have already leaked to an adversary like China. 

“We now face a dilemma between either proceeding with a technology we believe to be unsafe — or risking competition from an adversary who has the same resources, who has taken those algorithms, and perhaps is willing to tolerate higher risk,” Christiano said, as the hundreds of people seated around me seemed to visibly tense up. “I think that is one of the most likely ways that we end up in an extremely bad situation.”

Former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s sudden downfall is in a sense shocking, considering his wealth, global fame, and role leading what was until recently the world’s most valuable company.

But Huang’s immense influence in Washington — and particularly in President Donald Trump’s Washington — has long been intensely controversial among a surprisingly diverse cross-section of the political, business, and tech advocacy world. And his ouster not only drives a wedge through Trump’s second-term coalition, it could usher in a major change in how the US steers the AI revolution.

Huang — who resigned this week after allegations he’d had affairs with two Nvidia employees and one Chinese businesswoman who some US officials claim was spying on him for the Chinese government — has been crucial in helping shape the Trump administration’s AI policies. That’s perhaps no surprise, given that Nvidia’s advanced chips are crucial to the AI revolution.

His many critics, however, say Huang’s influence has been deeply harmful. Their main objection? They believe the Trump administration hasn’t been doing enough to stop China from getting or accessing advanced AI chips — in part because of Huang’s lobbying and sway with the president.

This coalition of Huang critics spans the political spectrum. It includes right-wing China hawks and the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, who want to win an AI race against China. It includes economic populists in both parties, who resent China’s economic sway. It even includes some leading members of the Trump administration itself — Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have reportedly pushed for tighter chip restrictions.

It also contains some even odder bedfellows. The coalition includes people who want to slow down the AI race, like the tech safety advocates who warn that advanced AI could cause human extinction. Yet it also includes two major US frontier AI companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, who hope to impede the growth of Chinese competitors by limiting their access to chips. 

All of these disparate groups come together around the core idea that the US urgently needs to do more to stop advanced chips from getting to China. Selling AI chips to China is like “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said.

Standing against them all — and often getting his way with Trump — has been Jensen Huang.

Beyond the obvious — Nvidia’s business is selling chips, and Huang wants to be able to sell more chips in more places — Huang is associated with a camp in the AI policy debate that some have dubbed with “let it rip.” Along with former White House AI czar David Sacks, Huang has scoffed at warnings that AI could cause human extinction, calling them “irresponsible” and “doomsday narratives.” He’s also dismissed some national security concerns, saying that being a “China hawk” was a “badge of shame” and said that the bigger risk to American influence over AI would be US companies losing market share around the world.

So Huang’s ouster and the claims of Chinese espionage around it have opened up an opportunity for a shakeup in US policy — and a rare chance for those China hawks to potentially investigate, undermine, and push out their rivals, while seizing the policy reins around chip exports. 

Trump administration officials who want tougher restrictions have their knives out for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a frequent ally of Huang’s. There’s a bipartisan push in Congress for new export controls legislation before the end of the year. Congressional Republican committee chairs are demanding Huang and Lutnick come in and testify in the coming weeks, before Democrats take over Congress.

Plus, there are the partisan incentives for Democrats to dig into the question of what Trump knew about all this (he was reportedly briefed on the spy concerns last fall). And there are political incentives for ambitious Republicans to find an issue on which they can distance themselves from an unpopular administration without antagonizing their conservative base. 

With so many different forces invested in the outcome, you can bet this topic will continue to dominate headlines for months to come — with unpredictable results for both the new Democratic Congress, the future of the GOP, and the AI boom.

The many critics of Jensen Huang’s influence on the Trump administration

In Washington itself, the most influential faction opposed to Huang is the bipartisan national security establishment, most of whom strongly believe in the necessity of competing with China for global influence. 

These “China hawks” were influential in the Biden administration and have historically been dominant in GOP administrations and on GOP-controlled congressional committees. And many of them have been flabbergasted at Trump’s policies toward China and Chips this term.

“I don’t think we should be using any American technology to uplift China’s capabilities in AI given how era-defining this technology will be in national security and in our economy,” Vivek Chilukuri of the Center for a New American Security, a center-left think tank, told me. “A company’s going to argue for this, that’s what companies do. But the interest of any one company should not be trumping the national security of the United States.

Moving further right, there’s a MAGA-aligned faction that is skeptical of foreign wars such as Trump’s conflict in Iran — but even some of them are still quite antagonistic to China.

Take, for instance, Trump’s onetime campaign manager and White House adviser Steve Bannon. He’s been furiously protesting Huang’s influence on the administration for more than a year — in September 2025, he argued that Huang should be arrested for being “an agent of influence of the Chinese Communist Party,” and argued we needed to “shut down” China’s “access to technology, chips, and training.”

Advocates and politicians focused on economic issues and reining in corporate power also have long criticized Nvidia. Oren Cass of the center-right group American Compass wrote an article titled “Break up Nvidia” last year, arguing that “its excessive concentration of power is exactly what antitrust law intends to combat.” 

Meanwhile, the left, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a longtime critic of Big Tech, has frequently suggested Huang was corruptly influencing the Trump administration. At a hearing in June, she mentioned that Huang or his company had donated to Trump’s inauguration and his White House ballroom project. “If it’s not plain old-fashioned bribery, it sure smells like it,” she said.

Many in the AI safety advocacy world have also long criticized — and feared — Nvidia. That’s in part because they hope slowing down sales of AI chips abroad could slow what they view as a dangerous race to superintelligence. Additionally, after AI safety fears hit the mainstream in September due to Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon’s resignation and viral warnings, Huang took an increasingly public role in dismissing such fears.

Other AI safety advocates cite the company as having a chilling effect on public debate. “For months now, I’ve heard about widespread fear among think tank researchers and policy experts who publish work against Nvidia’s interests,” AI safety researcher Steven Adler wrote last year. “If you speak with people in-the-know at AI companies, fear of retaliation from Nvidia is a major concern when staking out policy positions.”

Indeed, OpenAI and Anthropic are highly dependent on Nvidia for its chips, so open criticism of the company is not common. Yet those big two US AI labs have been at odds with Nvidia in urging the Trump administration to do more to crack down on Chinese access to advanced chips, and to more heavily scrutinize Chinese “open source” AI models.

But to Huang and others in his camp, the growth of Chinese AI is a feature, not a bug. Sacks, for instance, has repeatedly argued that “open weight” or “open source” models — which make their parameters publicly available, in contrast to the proprietary models of OpenAI and Anthropic — would help avert “an unsafe and dystopian future where advanced AI capabilities are centralized and controlled by only a few hands.” The leading open weight models are currently from Chinese companies.

Huang has also used a more straightforward argument: that what’s good for Nvidia is good for the United States of America.

“American technology has to win across the world at every single layer,” he said in May. “If we can export chips, we should.”

Now it will be left to Nvidia’s interim CEO, Colette Kress, to carry that message, instead of a rock-star founder with a global cult following that’s drawn comparisons to Steve Jobs at his peak at Apple. Her first task: taking stock of all the powerful actors across the political, advocacy, and business world rooting for her to fail. Perhaps DeepSeek could help make a list? 

Republicans weren’t the only big losers in last week’s midterms: Across the country, voters also backed restrictions on data centers and elected candidates promising tougher oversight of AI companies. Out of 41 local ballot initiatives limiting the data center buildout, 40 of them passed, according to the New York Times. 

The AI industry knows it was a tough cycle: Chris Lehane, the chief global affairs officer for OpenAI, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that “I could take my shirt off and show you my [metaphorical] bruises if you want.”

Now, OpenAI is figuring out how to move forward. Lehane talked with Sean from rural Texas, where he said he was on a “listening and learning” tour of communities around the site of a massive OpenAI data center. They discussed the lessons of the midterm election, why OpenAI would prefer that we call data centers “compute campuses,” and why Lehane thinks the 2028 presidential election will largely revolve around AI — just not in the same way that 2026 did.

“I just don’t think it’s going to be good enough for a candidate from either party to emerge from their primary by simply being the person who’s against things,” Lehane said. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You guys at OpenAI, in the wake of this shellacking, put out this big document saying that you’re going to be listening, you’re going to be learning, you’re going to be empowering local people and bringing jobs.

You’re also, in this document, rebranding data centers to “compute campuses,” which when I say it, I have trouble not laughing because it sounds like a bit of a joke to meet everyone’s concerns with a rebrand. Please tell us why you think this could work or why it’s a good idea.

We were very intentional in actually using that phrase. And we did it with the full knowledge that people would potentially be skeptical of it. But I do think there’s an intent behind provoking this conversation. 

Data centers have existed for 20-odd years and at some level they’re the proverbial empty box in a pasture. And they’re called data centers because that’s in fact what they were. When people talked about the cloud, this is actually where the cloud was housed, where you would load data if you were streaming a video, if you were ordering something from a delivery service. These AI facilities are really fundamentally different.

What is being generated at these facilities is something called compute. And compute is just the raw computing power that it takes to train AI systems and then run AI tools and products when you’re using them. 

Second of all, they’re different because [of] the amount of jobs that do get created directly. This is not half a dozen people in that empty box. These are real jobs, these are six-figure jobs. They are also huge opportunities for economic transformation if a community approaches it in a really strategic way and companies like ours do our part to work with those communities. We’re not just building in the communities, we’re building with the communities.

You’re out there in Texas because essentially, data centers and artificial intelligence have a PR problem. Seventy percent of the country, maybe more than that, says that they’re against data centers, or “compute campuses,” as you’re now calling them. 

Why do you think it is that data centers have such a public relations issue in this country right now?

There’s a variety of factors, but before even jumping into those, I do think it’s worth noting and worth emphasizing that we have roughly six of these projects up and running in the country. They’re in different stages of being built out and developed, but each and every one of them is moving forward. I do think that there is a right way to build these and perhaps a wrong way and we can get into that.

Do you think that you guys were doing it the wrong way before?

This goes to why I think we’ve actually been able to get approvals for each of the projects that we are doing. 

I think each of the individual projects themselves have been some version of a laboratory of democracy, where you actually learn from each project and apply those learnings to the next project. But I do think we got the fundamental insight right at the beginning, which is to actually go on the ground, listen, learn, hold yourself accountable and take the feedback and build your facility with the community.

I think that for a lot of communities, folks were coming in, they were building data centers, they were then transferring the electricity costs to the public, they were potentially impacting their water, they weren’t necessarily doing the type of community investments that you should do if you’re going to be building with a community. 

Where we’ve really tried to differ ourselves — and again, we’re not perfect, we’re learning every step of the way — but I do think that we have successfully applied the baseline as we’ve gone through this, which is, we make sure we’re paying for our own electricity, our own energy.

Point two is that we make sure we’re preserving water. We have something called closed water loops. I know this is getting a little bit technical, but think of these as sort of large radiators. You fill it up once and therefore you’re able to preserve the water.

One thing that seems clear from the election results is that there’s just not a lot of trust. Now there’s going to be a new Congress, and various components of said Congress are pledging to do more to regulate AI and tech. 

It wasn’t so long ago that the head of your company, Sam Altman, was calling for Congress to get more involved. Does that call still stand now that it’s a different Congress that might be more inclined to come down hard on AI?

When it comes to data centers, these are typically state or local issues. We envisioned that as state legislation that would actually make these requirements for folks who are building data centers to help give the public confidence that there’s going to be a real material benefit for them.

I think what you’re referring to was our call as OpenAI for there to be national-level mandatory safety requirements for the frontier labs who are building AI. We thought about that and called for it before the election. We think it’s more important than ever. 

Back in early September, I had a blog post out there that talked about this idea that the policy window was opening up to create a real opportunity to pass those mandatory safety requirements. And the reason I talked about the policy window being opened up is that you could clearly see where the politics were going, what was likely to happen with the election. 

You’re in Washington, DC. At some level, you have to be a romanticist to believe that you can actually get legislation passed. But what is happening is the politics are coming into alignment with the policy. I actually think both parties do recognize the importance of having mandatory national safety standards that would be good for the country. It would also put us in a position to be able to create international standards, which we also think is very important.

It’s funny, because we just had New York [state] assemblyman Alex Bores on the show. He was trying to be a congressperson, but a super PAC partly funded by OpenAI co-founders and some other Silicon Valley tech types spent a lot of money — millions — to defeat him. 

We asked him, if Democrats in Congress could do one thing to regulate AI, what would it be? And he said banning full recursive self-improvement, ban the practice of letting AIs build the next AIs without any human in the loop. Would OpenAI be open to that kind of regulation immediately?

The version that we have talked about is some version of broadly defined speed limits. I’ll use an analogy: As we were building out the automobile, ultimately we built out speed limits. Now, those speed limits changed over time, but the idea was to make sure that humans could actually have both hands on the wheel and be able to control the car and the car should not be able to go at a speed where a human would not be able to control it. 

Our north star in everything when it comes to AI is that people should be in control of this technology. The technology itself is accelerating, the capabilities are becoming stronger. And so I think there is a world here where we do need to build out a framework, potentially a regulatory framework, through legislation that effectively imposes some version of a speed limit.

If you think of speed limits being applied in the context of your question about recursive self-improvement, that’s a place where you could see the speed of the technology getting so strong that actually humans do lose control over it. 

I’m not sure it’s quite as binary as saying you do or do not do RSI. But I think spiritually, a similar concept, which is making sure that at the end of the day we have a lot of confidence that humans are actually in control of this, able to monitor it, able to make sure that it is not getting out of their control.

Before you worked with companies like OpenAI or Coinbase or Airbnb, you worked in government and you worked specifically in [the] Clinton White House.

I wonder, in the wake of this election — which people are calling the first big American AI election, and are saying that AI is going to be an even bigger issue for the presidential election in 2028 — what do you think companies like yours and all the other big-frontier AI companies need to be doing to flip the script in the United States, maybe around the world?

I think of 2026 as the trailer to 2028. AI was an issue. It wasn’t a top issue, but it was certainly an issue and an issue that was moving up the charts as we got closer and closer to the election. I think there is a decent chance, maybe even a strong chance, that AI is the issue in 2028. 

First and foremost, how do we make sure that people are actually in control of this technology? Who’s actually putting out an idea and a vision and approach to give people confidence that they’re going to actually be able to control this? 

I do think the 2026 election now sets up 2028, frankly for both parties, to have a conversation that I just don’t think we’ve had in this country for a long, long, long time. And that is, what does this social contract look like? Who actually has a big idea about how we’re going to make sure that the American dream actually exists in this country? And as part of that big idea, what is the role of AI going to be in that?

I just don’t think it’s going to be good enough for a candidate from either party to emerge from their primary by simply being the person who’s against things. I think they’re actually going to have to have some real ideas of what they are for. And at the core of that is, how are they going to address this anxiety that the American people have? And at the center of that anxiety is their ability to control their lives and make decisions about their lives.

They came to discuss AI, but EU leaders spent most of their time during a summit in Dublin on Friday grappling with questions about Ukraine — namely who should represent them in future peace talks.

Despite plenty of disagreement about whether it should be a single person (and if so, who) or a collection of them, they managed to strike a deal: Future talks would involve national security officials from Germany, France, the U.K., Italy and Poland — the so-called E5 powers — plus representatives from the European Commission and European Council. A classic European compromise.

“It is essential to have a team and to speak with one voice,” European Council President António Costa said after the summit, noting that Donald Trump had also tasked two envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, with conducting negotiations.

Ireland, which holds the EU’s rotating presidency and hosted the informal gathering, had billed the meeting as a rare chance for a high-level discussion on how to develop artificial intelligence in accordance with European values.

But the question of how to secure peace in Ukraine — and who should negotiate on Europe’s behalf — quickly dominated discussions, as leaders sparred over the format of future peace negotiations and warned about the risks of a potential deal brokered between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Indeed, a meeting next week between the U.S. and Russian leaders has set Europe on edge, prompting warnings about a possible Yalta-type agreement in which superpowers would decide on European security questions over the heads of countries directly concerned, reminiscent of talks toward the end of World War II that divided Europe up between the four allied powers.

“That is why I want to make our message to the U.S. very clear: Please, no surprises!” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said regarding the Trump-Putin meeting, scheduled to take place during an APEC summit in Shenzhen, China, on Nov. 18-19. “Continue to play on Team Europe and on the same team as Ukraine. And let’s work together for genuine peace in Ukraine.”

The question of who should represent Europe in future discussions about Ukraine and the post-conflict security order was added to the summit’s agenda at the last minute, following a request from Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

Earlier in the day, Merz had voiced preference for a narrower group made up of officials from Berlin, Paris and London, while Kaja Kallas, the EU’s chief diplomat, argued that she was best placed to lead discussions.

“I know that the Russians don’t want me, but do we have a say on who is representing Russia? No, we don’t,” said Kallas.

“We have a really strong team,” she went on. “I’m ready to do this work with foreign ministers.”

AI jockeys with Russia fears

It wasn’t all about Ukraine. Over a lunch of baked salmon fillets and crushed Ballymackenny potatoes, EU leaders grappled with the question of how to make AI more “sovereign” — that is, less dependent on U.S. and Chinese technology providers. 

“Our independence cannot be outsourced, it must be built here at home,” Macron wrote in a post on X in which he also announced that France and the Netherlands would host a meeting of “Tech Creators” on Dec. 2. 

Amid a global outage of Microsoft software (since resolved), Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch urged leaders to direct some €260 billion currently spent on foreign technology toward home-grown tech infrastructure, research and development. While the bloc has solid foundations on which to build AI solutions, Europe needs “speed, financing and a strong coordination between member states,” said Mensch.

But the AI discussion quickly ceded ground to existential questions about Ukraine, including how the bloc would finance Kyiv in coming months and whether Europe would get a seat at the table in upcoming rounds of Ukraine-Russia talks brokered by the U.S.

Just as leaders including Ukraine’s president were gathering in Dublin, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he was open to Europeans joining the talks, reversing Moscow’s previous opposition. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov quickly followed up with qualifications, however, stating that Europeans must first demonstrate “genuine intention and readiness to contribute to the peace process” before being admitted — a condition that Kallas quickly dismissed as a “trap.”

“If we start to talk about what Russia is asking regarding the security architecture, we actually walk into the traps that Russia is setting us, which is that we divert attention away from that there is no ceasefire,” she told reporters in Dublin.

Other officials said that Russia’s preconditions for allowing Europe to join the talks would mean concessions to Moscow’s war demands, namely a withdrawal of NATO from European states bordering Russia, the lifting of sanctions and a ban on foreign troops in Ukraine.

Giorgio Leali, Pieter Haeck, Sebastian Starcevic, Caroline Hug and Shawn Pogatchnik contributed to this article from Dublin.

DUBLIN — Friday’s widespread outage of Microsoft products has sparked a new wave of calls for Europe to control its own digital infrastructure — especially with the uncertain future of artificial intelligence at stake.

“Only 20% of European digital services run on European infrastructure,” Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said in remarks Friday after he addressed EU national leaders during their first-ever meeting on artificial intelligence in Dublin.

The money spent on foreign, U.S. or Chinese, technology “could be reinvested here, on infrastructure we control and [to] finance European research and development,” said the boss of Europe’s leading AI frontier lab.

Mensch didn’t specifically address the Microsoft outage, which lasted nearly 24 hours and affected millions of users in 74 countries. Still, the shutdown of key tools like Outlook email and Teams messaging impacted plenty of the tech and government leaders gathered in Dublin to chart Europe’s AI future.

French President Emmanuel Macron closed the day with a post on X: “Our independence cannot be outsourced. It must be built here at home, in Europe,” he wrote. “When it comes to artificial intelligence, too, Europe has everything it takes to compete. We have no time to lose.”

An EU diplomat present at the leaders’ talks said that “we need to pick up speed, permitting and investment to compete on the world market, to have sovereignty.”

Tech sovereignty, including control over the cloud, chips and models that power AI, has been a rallying cry of the second mandate of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and was one of the key agenda items at Friday’s gathering of the leaders of the EU’s 27 member countries.

“We have outsourced too much of our digital infrastructure to actors outside the EU,” Finnish European Parliament lawmaker Aura Salla said in a press release Friday following the outage. She suggested that government contracts specifically “must support European technology.”

Others zoned in on the risk created by relying on digital infrastructure controlled by a couple of large companies.

The Microsoft outage is a “reminder of the systemic risk created by concentrating digital infrastructure with a few global tech giants,” said Sebastian Toffaletti, secretary general of the Digital SME Alliance, in a statement shared with POLITICO.

In the U.K., the Liberal Democrat party’s tech spokesperson Victoria Collins said the outage demonstrated the need for a digital sovereign strategy, saying: “We need urgent action to stop relying on a handful of companies.”

In Germany, lawmaker Johannes Schätzl from the Social Democratic Party said it raised questions about public procurement. “Digital sovereignty must be measured by whether we can remain operational even during outages like this,” he said.

Joe Bambridge and Kilian Hocke contributed reporting.

DUBLIN— It’s becoming a familiar pattern at European Council summits: EU leaders are summoned to discuss one big strategic issue, only for another political crisis to steal the show.

Friday’s gathering in Dublin appears unlikely to break that trend.

While EU leaders are ostensibly meeting for their first dedicated discussion on artificial intelligence, the agenda is already crowded with more immediate fights over Ukraine, the ongoing splits over the bloc’s next budget, and who will take the helm at the European Central Bank.

Formal talks begin at 9:45 a.m. followed by lunch around 1 p.m. and a press conference provisionally scheduled for 4:15 p.m.

Here are the five issues that really matter — and what to watch for.

1. AI: Can Europe compete at the frontier?

Leaders will debate how Europe can build its own AI capacity, from computing power and cloud infrastructure to chips and models. European Council President António Costa framed the discussion around sovereignty, asking leaders to consider “how Europe can become a leading and sovereign player” across the AI value chain.

The central question is whether Europe should build frontier models to rival U.S. and Chinese developers, or focus on applications built on those models. Finland’s Petteri Orpo and Estonia’s Kristen Michal have argued that Europe “can compete at the frontier” and must aim beyond merely adopting AI.

The obstacle, however, is money. Leaders will discuss how to fund the computing capacity needed to turn European research into products. They will also hear from the CEO of French AI company Mistral, Arthur Mensch, who has railed against abandoning the frontier, and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton about global rules for the technology. The EU’s position is that its AI Act already provides a regulatory framework.

What to watch: Whether leaders back frontier AI development — and commit money to it.

2. Ukraine talks: Who speaks for Europe?

One of the most consequential discussions of the day will be who should represent the EU in future Ukraine peace talks, with European officials continuing to squabble over the matter.

Europeans will invited to the next round of negotiations, U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff said Thursday after meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow — a longstanding demand from the EU.

But Europe needs to choose a single person to represent them, ideally by the end of this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said earlier this week.

That’s a challenge for the bloc, which remains deeply divided over the choice.

Costa wants greater clarity on European representation and a coherent message from the bloc’s 27 members. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas argues that the treaties already provide an answer: She and Costa should represent the bloc. Estonian PM Kristen Michal backed that position in an interview with POLITICO.

France and Germany disagree, however. President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday that Europe must first agree on its proposals and security vision. Chancellor Friedrich Merz backed the E3 (Germany, France and the U.K.) as “a well-established format,” adding: “I don’t see any problem at all with things staying that way.”

What to watch: Whether leaders clarify who speaks for Europe, or leave competing channels in place.

3. Ukraine financing: The €70 billion shortfall

Leaders are also expected to address Ukraine’s funding needs, as Kyiv faces a €70 billion shortfall next year.

Merz linked Ukraine funding to negotiations on the EU’s next long-term budget in a letter to Costa, drawing resistance from governments wary of further commitments. He said that Germany, the bloc’s biggest budget contributor, can’t accept free-riders on Ukraine and European security.

The funding debate is also tied to Europe’s leverage in any eventual settlement. Some lawmakers want frozen Russian assets placed in an EU-controlled structure, arguing in a letter sent Thursday that the funds should not be available for a deal struck without Europe.

The question of funding for Ukraine will likely resurface at the Nov. 26-27 summit.

What to watch: Whether peace talks shift the funding debate — and whether governments can narrow their differences before the November summit.

4. The EU budget: Deal-making, not a deal

The 2028-2034 EU budget is not formally on Friday’s agenda, but leaders are expected to discuss it on the sidelines. A new negotiating document, setting out possible compromises, is expected around Nov. 21 ahead of the summit.

No breakthrough is expected in Dublin. Merz has signaled he will use the gathering for bilateral talks, including with Macron.

What to watch: Signs that major contributors and governments threatening to block a deal are narrowing their differences.

5. The ECB race: A wider jobs bargain

After a first chat on Thursday in Dublin, Macron and Merz are expected to discuss the race to replace European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde. Spain’s Pablo Hernández de Cos and former Dutch central banker Klaas Knot are the leading contenders.

The presidency is part of a broader contest over three senior appointments, with Germany’s Isabel Schnabel and Ireland’s Philip Lane also due to leave the ECB’s Executive Board in 2027. Paris and Berlin both want the chief economist post, according to two officials briefed on the discussions. One suggested Germany could secure it by backing Hernández de Cos, who is seen as less hawkish than Knot.

A deal is expected at the Nov. 26-27 summit. Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez and Dutch leader Rob Jetten — both backing their country’s candidates — will miss Dublin amid domestic political pressures.

What to watch: Whether Macron and Merz begin trading support for the ECB’s top jobs ahead of November.

Hans von der Burchard, Giorgio Leali and Seb Starcevic contributed to this report.

BRUSSELS — It takes an 80-year-old German diplomat to put the Jensen Huang spy scandal in proper historical context. 

Asked about allegations that the Nvidia CEO was lured into an intimate relationship with a Chinese spy, Wolfgang Ischinger, Germany’s former ambassador to Washington, pointed to the past. “In World War I, you had female spies who used the honey trap to talk to a general, and maybe sleep with him and extract some secrets,” he told POLITICO.

As Europe’s 27 leaders meet for their first conversation on AI the day after Huang’s resignation, his fall from grace is a reminder that it’s American tech bros — not European military men — who now hold the secrets that can decide the fate of the world.

Friday’s roundtable of European leaders in Dublin must reckon with the reality that the pursuit of AI superiority remains a two-horse race between the U.S. and China — and that Nvidia’s leadership drama doesn’t change the fact that a single American company’s chips will continue to drive the artificial intelligence boom.

With the meeting meant to help forge a new direction for Europe on AI, leaders will mostly be in listening mode, with presentations by Arthur Mensch, CEO of French AI company Mistral, and computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, considered one of the “godfathers of AI” and an advocate for more stringent safety measures. 

“We’re not going to pretend that we are experts,” an EU official said.

The session comes as Europe struggles to find its place in global AI. The rise of advanced U.S.-built proprietary models and open-weight artificial intelligence progress in China has created a new range of national security issues — and while the EU has proven to be a leader in regulating the technology, its own would-be frontier AI labs continue to play catch-up.

Although this week’s events are a reminder to European politicians that they are spectators in the AI race, an emerging split between top industry leaders in Europe is also dampening momentum on a bloc-wide effort to take on the competition.

“Switching dependency from California to France doesn’t solve Europe’s sovereignty problem, right?” Uljan Sharka, CEO of leading Italian company Domyn, said in an interview.

Sovereignty

Sovereignty and security are the main arguments for Europe not to abandon efforts to develop its own frontier AI models. In the past year, EU officials and companies have struggled to access the latest models from OpenAI and Anthropic, which drive much of the current risks around the technology. 

“How can Europe become a leading and sovereign player in strategic areas of the AI value chain?” European Council President António Costa asked EU leaders in his invitation letter. 

Yet in classic European fashion, officials disagreed ahead of the meeting on how to catch up across many layers of the AI supply chain, from chips and cloud services to cutting-edge models.

“We cannot abandon the frontier ambition. It’s an issue of our sovereignty, it’s an issue of our competitiveness,” Malgorzata Nikowska, head of unit at the European Commission’s Artificial Intelligence Office, said at an event last week. 

It was a moment of clarity in a frantic debate about whether Europe should still chase the frontier in AI, which would require ploughing billions of euros into compute power — or focus on deriving value by applying the technology in key industries. 

Mistral’s Mensch has been a key voice in that debate, warning that giving up the frontier would be “a fundamental mistake” in an essay titled “Build or Surrender.” 

Two European PMs — Finland’s Petteri Orpo and Estonian Kristen Michal — came out swinging ahead of Friday’s meeting, saying “Europe can compete at the frontier” and that the bloc’s ambition “must go beyond adoption of AI,” in a letter exclusively seen by POLITICO.

These statements, and Mensch’s presence at the table Friday, suggest EU leaders will commit to continuing to build competitive frontier models. But how to get there is a far more vexed question — and European industry executives are offering different answers. 

Mistral has taken the route of building large open models. Its latest Large 4 model crossed the 1-trillion-parameter mark, allowing it to rival some of the world’s best open models such as from China’s Moonshot AI. 

To get there, the French company relied on President Emmanuel Macron as its best-placed salesman, and multi-billion euro funding rounds valuing the company at over €21 billion. 

But Mistral’s European rivals don’t necessarily agree with Mistral’s approach of training large models through vast amounts of compute power. 

Sharka — whose company was chosen to lead an EU-backed consortium to develop an open-source AI model that can cover the 24 EU languages by next year — argues Europe should not follow the example of OpenAI and Anthropic to use ever-more compute power for ever-larger models.

Instead, Sharka argued, it should aim to optimize the training runs of the models. “To build the European frontier, we need to be original,” he said. “I think we need to shift away from the concept of copy-pasting like unfortunately some players are pushing.” 

He argued that the typical AI scaling laws, which claim that a model performs better if it is larger and has more compute power, have “plateaued.” 

“There’s only one way, and it’s not the Mistral way to be clear,” he said, adding that there’s a “lot of space for optimization.” 

Mistral did not respond to a request for comment.

The Nvidia problem

Sharka was joined in his assessment by Aldo Podestà, CEO of Swiss AI model provider Giotto.ai., who argued there are ways to be more efficient about “pre-training,” typically the most compute-intensive part of building an AI model.

“We have the opportunity to be at the frontier without having that massive pre-training cost,” Podestà said. “My bet would be to have one very strong common open-source pre-training exercise” — after which different companies can tweak the outcome to their needs.

Under any scenario, Europe will still rely on the U.S. for the hardware components that power its AI models — especially Nvidia’s AI chips — since the continent has little design or production capacity of its own. 

Podestà said the bloc shouldn’t worry merely about building its own models.

“We need to open up a serious discussion about the hardware dependency we have,” he said. “Today it’s a monopoly for a single company.”

Nvidia employees and tech insiders never thought the chip king would lose his job. Despite his sudden resignation, many of them are still in denial.

The first big sex scandal of the AI era has taken down Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder and longtime CEO. Nvidia’s board of directors announced his resignation on Thursday morning and named CFO Colette Kress as interim CEO.

Huang has been making headlines all week after news broke Friday that he had an affair with Alice Huang (no relation), an executive at Singaporean tech firm Megaspeed who the US government alleges was also a Chinese spy.

The revelation Wednesday of a second extramarital affair, this time with an Nvidia employee reporting to Huang directly, added to the pressure, and another affair came to light later on Thursday after Huang’s ouster.

The scandal has implications far beyond one company: Huang’s central role in the AI race can’t be overstated. It was his vision of an AI future that led him to pivot Nvidia from a small company making video game chips into the dominant player in making the chips that serve OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google’s computing needs.

Huang is close friends with President Donald Trump’s and a leading voice in resisting efforts to slow AI progress. And he has pushed for the US to take a less hawkish position toward China’s own AI goals, a stance now called into question by his relationship with an alleged Chinese spy. Among its other impacts, the news has revived efforts on Capitol Hill to further restrict chip exports to China.

To break down the national security implications of Huang’s departure, how the Trump administration is involved, and what it says about US AI industry writ large, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Garret De Vynck, a technology reporter at the Washington Post.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Nvidia has been called the central bank of AI, which is why it’s so important that we figure out what Jensen Huang may have disclosed to this alleged spy. How long has the president known about this, as far as we know?

As far as we know, the president has known about the fact that Jensen Huang was in a relationship with someone that the US government thought was a spy for about a year. This circulated within the administration, and the decision was made not to tell Jensen.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that it was automatically some kind of corrupt decision of President Trump protecting Jensen Huang. There’s all sorts of reasons why you might not want to tell someone they’re being spied on, the number one being that they might blow up the operation. Maybe you want to learn more. Maybe you suspect that the person themselves knows that they’re being spied on and is willingly sharing information and you need some more time to gather that. It’s unclear why the US government specifically chose not to pull in Jensen Huang. 

It’s also a little bit unclear whether he knows he was being spied on, or whether maybe he was told through some kind of back channel. He has said that he did not know that she was a spy and he is admitting to the affair, to the infidelity. He’s admitting to essentially breaking Nvidia’s code of conduct by sleeping with one of its customers, but he is not admitting at all to knowing that she was a spy and definitely not admitting to sharing any information willfully.

It feels like this is the kind of thing that the government would investigate. There’s been reporting that the Commerce Department was involved with some kind of investigation, but that investigation came to an end and no one really knows why.

The context here is that the United States and China are in an AI race. Going back to the first Trump administration, there’s been pretty aggressive export controls saying, “We don’t want China to get our tech so that they can develop AI.” And the Biden administration continued that. He increased the export controls on China. China was complaining very loudly about this. They said, ‘We don’t care. We want to win AI and we need to slow you guys down.’

When Trump came in, he actually lifted his foot off the gas a little bit. They didn’t throw the gates open and say, “You can have whatever you want. All American companies can sell whatever they want to China.” But he said, “Some AI chips that are less powerful than the state of the art. We can send those to Chinese companies.“

The other thing that national security experts have pointed out is that the Trump administration could theoretically have been doing more to stop the smuggling of computer chips to China. And that’s where this story gets so important for national security.

Megaspeed is accused of essentially being a front for Chinese companies to get access to computer chips. Journalists have gone to Megaspeed’s office in Singapore where it’s based, and there were only a couple of people working there. It didn’t really seem like there was a lot going on. Nvidia has said all through this process over the last couple of years that, “No, we’ve checked it out, Megaspeed is a legitimate company and we’re not breaking the law when it comes to this.”

There are a lot of questions and what everyone is focused on finding out, both journalists and I would say congressional Democrats when they come into office in the new year is, is there something more going on here? Is there something where the Chinese either convinced Jensen Huang to sell more chips to them or Jensen Huang himself, who has been advocating for selling more chips to China, essentially did this himself? 

“I think there’s this real question of: Do we see a much stronger push to actually ramp up controls on China and how does Trump respond?”

He’s been pressuring the president, he’s been donating to him, he’s been glad-handing with the president and the president has been listening more to this corporate executive who is his friend and who donated him a bunch of money rather than listening to China hawks or national security experts who say we should be limiting what China is able to access.

That’s really where the locus of this investigation is going to be. It’s not so much that Jensen Huang had an affair. It’s more the fact that he himself is someone who has said we need to sell more computer chips to China and he was involved with an alleged Chinese spy, and he’s very close to the president and had influence on the president.

You mentioned the Democrats. Have they said anything? Are they going to call him in front of Congress for an investigation?

Going forward, there are two big things here. One of them is these investigations into Jensen Huang and this whole situation. The company is likely going to continue to investigate. Maybe more information will come out there. Jensen Huang has been called to speak later this month in Congress. And congressional Democrats have also said that when they come into power in January, they will be asking him. 

The second big thing that comes out of this is, what does America do when it comes to China and AI? Now that one of the biggest advocates for being a bit more friendly towards China when it comes to selling them things that they need for AI is out of the room and completely discredited, I think that the China hawks, those who say we need to crack down more aggressively, we need to limit China’s access to AI computer chips, they’re really coming into ascendance here and they’re in the Republican Party, they’re in the Democratic Party, some of them, people like Marco Rubio, are even in the Cabinet. 

I think there’s this real question of: Do we see a much stronger push to actually ramp up controls on China and how does Trump respond? There’s all sorts of geopolitical things that could sort of spin out of this CEO affair.

I’m old enough to remember when a board tried to get rid of Sam Altman and then he was just back a week later. Elon Musk is already offering Jensen Huang a job. Is there a fair chance that he just goes somewhere that’s not that concerned about espionage affairs or getting with your VP of health or whatever it is? Is he just going to go work for China?

I don’t think he’s going to go work for China. This is definitely the wildest corporate story since Sam Altman was fired as CEO and brought back three or four days later. It’s a very different situation. That was a startup where you essentially have five or six investors who get to make the call about who the CEO is, and the employees at that company overwhelmingly wanted to bring Sam Altman back. I think they wanted more continuity of the company, but they also wanted to make sure that their company didn’t go under and go bankrupt and get disappeared, which was sort of on the table at that point in time. 

Nvidia’s not going anywhere. Obviously employees have lost a lot of money in terms of the stock value already coming down due to the situation. So employees are probably shocked. They’re probably upset. Jensen Huang is broadly loved at Nvidia, and so I can definitely see that employees would be doing petitions, asking for him to return. 

But this is a giant public company and the board makes a decision here. Jensen Huang was untruthful publicly and I think that also will make other public companies hesitant before rushing to bring him on as CEO.

As we’ve talked about many times in the show, half of our economy is staked on AI at this point. How concerned should we be that one of the most important people in this industry was so easily duped in this honeypot situation? Are these the people we should be trusting with the future of our society?

It’s a really good reminder that people are people. I think that we like to lionize individuals and say that they are the ones who are going to take us into the future and they are inventing the future and it’s so incredible. And I do think Jensen Huang gets a lot of credit for making sure that the companies kept up in AI, but at the end of the day, it was also a lucky break for them that the computer chips they were making just happened to work well for the math that is required by artificial intelligence. 

I do think that this speaks to something that a lot of people across the country and maybe even the world really feel. They do not want to sign off the future to a dozen dudes in Silicon Valley and their collaborators in the Trump White House. I think that is a view that a lot of people increasingly have. I think it was one of the factors in the midterms, maybe not the most important one, but people are concerned about concentration of power. They’re concerned about AI and they don’t see it as something that they themselves have control over. 

I think that this is just going to be another thing that sort of adds skepticism to the idea that people like Jensen Huang should be the ones making the final decision when it comes to artificial intelligence.

A recent WIRED investigation explored the complicated definition of “power” for women in the industry. Jensen Huang’s answers now appear to show his blind spots.

After initial talks stalled, workers at Google DeepMind are trying to bypass company management in their bid to unionize.

Since the scandal involving an alleged Chinese spy began, Nvidia has lost an eye-watering sum from its market value.

Nvidia’s longtime chief financial officer helped transform the company into an AI powerhouse. Now she’s taking the reins following Jensen Huang’s resignation on Thursday.

Over 50 leaders are descending on Dublin today for the European Political Community summit — but it’s not a popular one.

Today on the show, Zoya Sheftalovich and Kathryn Carlson discuss why insiders don’t find the forum particularly useful, and some even hope it will end once French President Emmanuel Macron — who spearheaded the initiative — leaves office.

One meeting leaders are more eager to attend, however, is Friday’s informal European Council, also taking place in Dublin. High on the agenda is the thorny question of who should represent Europe in future Ukraine peace talks, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ups the pressure with a November deadline. Plus, AI will be a crucial topic: from Europe’s place in the global AI race to cybersecurity concerns.

Finally, Finland’s embassy in Canberra is going viral … and no one quite knows why.

Questions? Comments? Message us on WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29.

Articles mentioned in this episode:

• US to seek Putin’s ‘blessing’ for Europe to join Ukraine talks.
• Zelenskyy tells Europe to hurry up and pick a rep for peace talks with Russia.
• Finland’s embassy in Canberra is going viral — and no one knows why.
  

An OpenAI model helped me teach the Microduck to waddle and moonlight as a tiny cat butler.

BRUSSELS—The European Union should have a plan to respond to serious artificial intelligence incidents, two EU countries said ahead of a key Friday meeting of national leaders focused on AI.

In a letter seen by POLITICO, Finland and Estonia say the bloc “can still compete at the frontier” of AI by mobilizing capital and building up compute power, but this should go hand in hand with “governing it responsibly.”

The two countries, considered among Europe’s digital leaders, call for “EU-level arrangements for responding to serious AI incidents.”

AI safety and security are on Friday’s agenda of the first-ever European Council meeting devoted to the revolutionary new technology.

Concerns about whether Europe is prepared to respond to AI-powered threats have been picking up steam since a series of incidents this summer in which AI agents went rogue and hacked into other companies. Recent cyberattacks and revelations of coding vulnerabilities have also raised concerns that security systems must be better equipped for the arrival of artificial intelligence.

Hungary pushed for a network of national contact points in case AI model providers lose control of their models, in an October paper seen by POLITICO. The country also pushed for a team of “pre-vetted, security-cleared” independent evaluators who can be ahead of incidents.

The letter from Finland and Estonia called for investment in European frontier AI models “as an economic priority and as a foundation for Europe’s influence on the future of AI.”

The countries warn that Europe requires “independent capacity to evaluate the most advanced models and their safety and security risks.”

China’s use of sexpionage is a well-established intelligence tactic with recent, high-profile examples. So how did the world’s most powerful AI executive fall for it?

The young girl’s parents allege that she used Gemini via her school Chromebook to plan her suicide, but the school’s monitoring systems didn’t know until it was almost too late.

BRUSSELS — You know that customer-service bot that won’t let you cancel your subscription? The EU wants to kill it.  

With a new law presented Wednesday, the European Commission will take aim at the endless array of practices websites have used over the past 20 years to make more money from consumers.  

The Digital Fairness Act is the European response to a wider regulatory trend that has seen consumer authorities curb irksome and exploitative practices. These include dynamic pricing that changes ticket prices based on demand, cumbersome processes for canceling subscriptions and the near-complete surrender of customer service to automated systems.  

According to a draft of the DFA obtained by POLITICO, the Commission will address several aspects of the design, service and terms under which businesses interact with consumers online. 

“Europe should not accept a digital economy where profits depend on exploiting people’s vulnerabilities,” Spanish socialist lawmaker Laura Ballarín Cereza, a key European lawmaker on tech legislation, said in a statement.

Industry leaders have pushed back on this potential new rulebook ever since the EU executive began considering a revision of consumer law in 2022. They say current consumer protection and digital services laws already cover these practices. “Where existing rules already cover a practice, it should not be regulated or enforced a second time,” said Ben Brake, director general of tech lobby DOT Europe.  

Consumer groups say existing rules, some dating back to 2005, are not clear enough and that many unfair design practices are still rampant.  

The Commission would have the power to impose fines of up to 6% of global annual revenue for companies that violate the new law. Those penalties are similar to fines levied under the Digital Services Act, the EU’s platform rules meant to stop Big Tech platforms from provoking systemic, society-wide harms through everything from election interference to keeping minors away from violent content. The new law instead would apply to any business offering services to EU consumers online. 

Dark patterns

The DFA would ban deceptive design known as “dark patterns,” which manipulate consumers through the use of such tactics as bright-colored buttons placed prominently to get customers to buy something. It also aims to ban personalized pricing that targets vulnerable consumers, including minors.  

The practice of dynamic pricing is also targeted in the law. That’s when a seller adjusts the price based on conditions such as demand or a user’s location, and it is commonly used in the sale of concert and airline tickets. The proposed law requires transparency when customers are buying products whose prices are subject to change.  

The DFA also covers consumer rights around “agentic commerce,” when artificial intelligence agents are used to find and complete purchases. 

Four lawmakers from the conservative, socialist and liberal groups said the requirement doesn’t go far enough and that the DFA should completely ban dynamic pricing for cultural and sporting events, according to a letter obtained by POLITICO. 

Sellers offering subscriptions will have to provide an easy way to cancel, reminiscent of New York State’s “click to cancel” rules. The new EU rules also require that a human is available for after-sales customer support.  

The rules also address, for the first time, specific aspects of online gaming, including bans on video games that allow kids to pay to succeed and progress in the game.  

The DFA is also trying to make its mark on what is known as “addictive design” of online platforms. This has already been the target of enforcement action in Europe and litigation in the U.S. in cases involving minors. But the new consumer rules would apply to adults as well, requiring online platforms to offer an opt-out from addictive features like autoplay.  

Spain’s Ballarín Cereza thinks this is not enough, saying users should be opted out of these features by default. “Why should consumers carry the burden when companies deliberately design these addictive mechanisms? We must shift from consumer responsibility to corporate responsibility: safety and fairness must be the default, not an option,” she said.