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. 

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.”

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.” 

John Sakellariadis contributed to this report.

he world is starting to understand that there is no way to fully and lastingly protect itself from President Donald Trump.

The man just can’t let things go — and he’ll get creative to get what he wants.

The latest blowup over Ukraine is emblematic of Trump’s wily persistence, and it suggests a challenging two years lie ahead for the international set even if Democrats gain some power in the midterm elections.

Not that long ago, Trump seemed to have patched up ties with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as Kyiv made gains against Russia. Trump signed legislation last month that was championed by his late friend, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), to impose heavy new sanctions and tariffs to punish Russia for its war on Ukraine.

This month, the original Trump — the one who fawns over Russian leader Vladimir Putin and despises Zelenskyy — roared back. He waived many of the legislation’s penalties on Russia, moved to buy Russian diesel and signaled he’s more interested in doing business with Moscow than seeking justice for Kyiv. Ukrainians suspect the U.S. has pressured them by throttling its satellite connections and intelligence-sharing. (The Trump administration disputes much of this.)

“Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” Trump said Monday as he welcomed the idea of an arms control summit with Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping that might include talks about Ukraine.

The lesson, foreign officials and others steeped in diplomacy tell me, is that you cannot truly change Trump’s mind or stop his overall trajectory. Even if Trump seems briefly chastened or stages a tactical retreat, he will eventually return in new, often-surprising modes to push his original views and goals. He will try to exhaust you into submission.

Imagine how startling it is to be Ukrainian these days as Trump pressures you to make concessions to Russia by blaming you for a global energy crisis he caused by launching a war on Iran. Or what it’s like for officials across European capitals trying to craft a response, knowing there’s never an end to the process.

“There is no immunity to Donald Trump. He makes a deal in order to make a better deal the next day,” one senior European official mused, having been granted anonymity because the topic involves sensitive diplomacy.

It’s hard to blame world leaders who think they’ve learned to manage Trump only to be bewildered by a sudden left hook on his part. Foreign policy is often driven by hope when you lack good options. And Trumpology is a confounding, but still a relatively new, subfield.

Besides, Trump’s messaging is inconsistent, incoherent and nonstrategic — characteristics that can obscure his single-minded pursuit of his goals. So the global actors dealing with him — whether it’s the Gulf Arab states who shower him with gifts or the Canadians furious over his trade and territorial threats — sometimes think they’ve come to terms with him only to find they’re fighting on a newly configured plane.

A Supreme Court ruling that gutted many of Trump’s tariffs earlier this year was good news in many capitals. But since then, the so-called Tariff Man has moved to impose the import taxes under pretexts not considered by the court, including turning to accusations involving forced labor.

The White House doesn’t dispute Trump’s aggressive tactics.

“There is no greater fighter for America First interests than President Trump — and he is willing to look anyone in the eye to deliver wins on behalf of the United States,” spokesperson Anna Kelly told me in a statement.

The Greenland saga shows the limits of trying to mollify Trump.

In his first term, Trump wanted to buy the frozen island. The idea was shelved amid global laughter, but authorities in Greenland and Denmark made it clear to Trump that they welcomed more U.S. investment in the Danish territory.

In his second term, Trump huffed and puffed about an all-out U.S. takeover of Greenland, only to agree in September to an expanded U.S. military footprint that he could have gotten anyway under existing, decades-old diplomatic accords without all the drama. The whole affair has led to lingering anger in Europe about what Canada’s leader called a “rupture” in the global order — but many European officials hoped that the saga had faded away.

Yet, it’s far from certain that Trump has given up on possessing Greenland. Just days ago, he touted on social media plans to start oil, gas and mineral exploration in “our new and beautiful Greenland.”

The use of “our” is more than a little suggestive.

Defying Trump, too, can get you only so far.

Brazilians effectively told Trump to take a hike when he used tariffs and sanctions to punish the country for charging its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, in a coup attempt.

A few months later, as Bolsonaro was about to start his prison sentence, Trump seemed to admit defeat in his effort to help his political ally. “That’s too bad,” he said in November 2025, with little emotion. (“Brazil Defied Trump and Won,” The New York Times declared.)

But Trump wasn’t done with Brazil. He and his team have pursued efforts to undercut the current Brazilian government while quietly backing Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio, in his efforts to win the presidency this year. The runoff election is on Sunday, and it’s tight.

World leaders are doing what they can to make their countries Trump-resistant, if not all-out Trump-proof.

That has meant everything from diversifying their sources of trade and security alliances to joining Trump on ventures that, on the surface at least, can be helpful to them. (Then there are the many countries, especially in Africa, that diplomats privately tell me are happy to be off Trump’s radar.)

My takeaway from watching all of this, though, is that it’s not enough to stay one step ahead of Trump. You have to stay several steps ahead, and you have to be wildly imaginative about the lengths to which Trump and his devoted aides are willing to go to complicate your life.

The second Trump administration is filled with people who have turned to unique, bizarre and clever interpretations of law and reality to push his agenda. It’s not always clear who is behind which move, but it’s hard to imagine Trump isn’t fine with most of what’s happening.

It’s why a teenager is being held in immigration detention for the actions of his grandmother decades ago. It’s why Congress can scream and shout about its spending orders yet Trump ignores it.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said other nations should not hope that the Republican Party will shed Trump’s worldview, including his disdain for allies, once Trump’s out of power.

“I would love for our allies to know that we have consistent common adversaries that we’re going to work together to fight. I just don’t know that you can make that guarantee,” Murphy, a frequent Trump critic, told me. “That’s painful to say, but given the state of the Republican Party right now, it’s true.”

I understand why Ukraine and the European Union are trying to diversify their sources of intelligence and military industrial bases as Trump keeps chasing love from Russia.

Despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claims, the reality is that the United States can no longer be trusted for such security assistance.

But it’s not enough to find new intelligence partners or weapons manufacturers. You have to ask bigger questions, like, “What are the untapped streams of intelligence that no one knows are out there? What’s a potential weapon no one has considered? How can I acquire what I need before Trump stops me?”

Governments need to have plans — now — for scenarios that seem completely crazy. Better to be wrong than unprepared.

Still, even if you do all of that … “I don’t think it’s possible to stay two or three steps ahead of Trump,” said Charles Kupchan, a former senior national security official during the Obama administration who apparently enjoys raining on parades.

“He acts on impulse,” argued Kupchan, who has a new book out on the crumbling world order. “We need to try to limit the damage he’s causing and ride him out.”

A Democratic win in November’s midterms — one or both chambers of Congress — is unlikely to do much to rein in Trump’s actions abroad during his final years, current and former U.S. and foreign officials tell me.

He still has the veto and has been willing to ignore congressional demands. There’s also the fact that presidents have significantly more power to act in unilateral ways overseas than they do domestically.

Ukraine, the European Union, the world — all will be dealing with a politically wounded Trump who’s likely to double down on what he feels he must have.

“He’s going to be angrier,” Murphy predicted.

PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron has instructed local authorities to ban protests on Saturday except those organized by unions, he said Thursday.

Any request to “protest” or “regroup” made by people “who have no legitimacy to do so” will be “refused,” Macron said after a security meeting with Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu and intelligence services.

The aim, he added, is to maintain public order and “protect businesses” after last week’s turmoil in France.

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets, while incidents of vandalism and looting affected thousands of businesses and public buildings on the sidelines of the protests.

Calls for a fresh round of protests have already begun to emerge online, raising the possibility of a protest movement that becomes a weekly occurrence, as was the case during the 2018-2019 Yellow Vest movement.

“The president believes that six months before a presidential election, debate should take place more in TV studios, in newspapers, and ultimately by the choice at the ballot box,” a person close to the French president said.

Trade unions usually hold talks with local authorities ahead of planned demonstrations. For Saturday, authorities may offer “alternative routes” to ensure maximum security, Macron announced.

He added that he will chair a defense council Friday and announce “new decisions” afterward.

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said elite tactical police units and a military unit normally deployed on French soil for counterterrorism operations would also be mobilized this weekend.

The government has been accused of mismanaging last week’s protests by significantly underestimating the number of demonstrators and consequently failing to deploy enough police to prevent criminal acts on the sidelines.

A protest organized by a major trade union Saturday in Paris has been approved, French media reported, while all protests in the area including Lyon, one of the country’s biggest cities, have been banned.

BRUSSELS — Centrist parties backing European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen clashed at Thursday’s European Parliament plenary over whether to hold artificial intelligence firms accountable for harm.

The EU executive had considered specific liability rules for AI in 2022, but withdrew these last year as part of the EU’s major simplification effort to make the bloc more competitive.

“To withdraw the AI liability directive was a big mistake,” said Alex Agius Saliba, a Maltese vice-president of the Socialists and Democrats, part of the majority coalition. “We strongly urge the Commission to bring forward this important piece of legislation.”

Thursday’s plenary debate, in which discussions centered on a global framework to regulate AI, showed strong tensions inside Europe between the centrist coalition backing von der Leyen. While the center-left pushed for new rules to address a series of AI-fueled hacking incidents, the center-right doubled down on simplification to ensure European companies can compete in the global AI race.

Socialist and Green lawmakers called for a new AI Liability Act in a bid to hold AI companies liable for harm done by their models, as with more traditional manufacturers’ products.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman floated a similar idea for a new liability framework for companies whose models are capable of autonomous cyberattacks in the wake of this summer’s hack by autonomous OpenAI agents into another AI platform, Hugging Face.

“If a phone charger explodes in your house, we never call it innovative. We call it cheap, dangerous junk, and we hold the manufacturer liable for damages,” said Dutch Green European Parliament lawmaker Kim van Sparrentak.

She urged the Commission to “stop scrapping rules to please [U.S. President Donald] Trump” and come up with a “strong new liability act that covers the testing and the development of AI.”

The debate quickly descended into a fierce back-and-forth between key AI-focused lawmakers from von der Leyen’s centrist coalition.

“It feels [to] me like the Greens and the Socialists are living [on] a completely different planet than the rest of us when they are screaming for more regulation,” said Swedish center-right lawmaker Arba Kokalari, who led the work on the AI omnibus, which delayed a core section of the EU’s flagship AI law.

She said the EU already had a comprehensive regulatory framework — the AI Act — of which some parts are not even into force, and said the EU should focus on avoiding falling behind in the global AI race instead. She called for “less bureaucracy, more private investments, better access to data and computing infrastructure.”

Italian Social Democrat Brando Benifei, who led work on the AI Act in the previous mandate, snapped back that Europe should lead with new liability rules, “or we will need to wait for the next blogpost of a CEO to know what is happening.”

German Green lawmaker Sergey Lagodinsky also fired back at Kokalari: “What planet do you live on? Not on the planet where [AI] agents break out.”

International Partnerships Commissioner Jozef Síkela pointed out at the end of the debate that the rules were withdrawn because EU countries and European Parliament lawmakers couldn’t reach an agreement on them.

KYIV – At least one person was killed and 34 wounded in Kyiv as the Russian army attacked Ukraine with ballistic missiles and attack drones overnight, the capital city’s prosecutor’s office reported on Thursday. Overall, 12 Ukrainian regions were under bombardment, authorities said.

“Russian ‘humanitarians’ have launched three waves of ballistic missile strikes against Kyiv, using a total of 21. Unfortunately, the city has sustained significant damage and multiple hits, affecting residential buildings, energy infrastructure, a railway station and the metro, shopping centers, and industrial enterprises. Even a monastery is among the damaged sites,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post on Telegram after the attack.

Ukrainian forces reported shooting down 181 out of 210 Russian drones but none of the ballistic missiles.

Zelenskyy said Russia launched its attack “almost immediately” after talks between U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Russian President Vladimir Putin ended Wednesday.  

Witkoff left St. Petersburg after praising Vladimir Putin as a “humanitarian,” a word U.S. Vice President JD Vance suggested was tied to the release of Stephen Hubbard, a U.S. citizen detained by Russia since 2022. “We’re getting close to ending the war. We may be closer now than ever before,” U.S. President Donald Trump said shortly after the talks.

Ukrainian forces said they killed and wounded a record 2,250 Russian soldiers – the largest number of Russian casualties in 24 hours since 2022, Ukrainian Army General Staff said in a press statement sent to POLITICO on Thursday.

Also on Thursday, Russia’s defense ministry reported shooting down 808 Ukrainian drones over 17 regions, including Ukrainian occupied territories.

BRUSSELS — Europe’s biggest media companies have asked regulators in Brussels and London to stop Meta from introducing new terms they say would let it copy publishers’ websites to build artificial intelligence, as a backlash that began in the U.S. spreads across Europe.

In a letter Monday, the European Publishers Council, whose members include POLITICO’s owner Axel Springer, called on EU competition boss Teresa Ribera and tech chief Henna Virkkunen to press Meta to put the terms on hold before they take effect Oct. 30.

The group wants Brussels to check them against EU copyright and competition law, and has requested an urgent meeting with the teams of both commissioners.

“The Commission remains committed to ensure that Meta’s practices fully comply with all applicable obligations under EU law, including competition rules and the Digital Markets Act,” Commission spokesperson Ricardo Cardoso told POLITICO, referring to the EU’s rulebook for Big Tech. He said Brussels was aware of both Meta’s changes and publishers’ concerns.

The U.K. competition watchdog has moved as well. British publishers have complained to the Competition and Markets Authority that Meta is so dominant they are compelled to accept its terms. 

The watchdog’s chief, Sarah Cardell, told British lawmakers on Tuesday that it had asked Meta to explain the changes and would meet the company on Wednesday. She named Meta as a possible candidate for Britain’s new rules for tech giants.

The terms cover businesses that use Meta’s tools to run Facebook pages, Instagram accounts or ads, which includes almost every newsroom. 

The fight began in the U.S. last week, when Nieman Lab, a journalism research outlet at Harvard, reported on the terms after receiving a tip from a small business owner.

As first written, they let Meta send automated programs to copy websites linked to those accounts and use the material to “train” its products, Nieman Lab concluded. There is no opt-out, and a business that continues to use Meta’s tools after Oct. 30 will be deemed to have consented.

Publishers say the terms would hand Meta content for free that other AI companies pay to license.

Rapid reaction

On Friday, Meta communications chief Andy Stone responded on X that the Nieman Lab report was “false” and that there was “no change to how Meta uses web crawlers.”

Stone said the update aimed to let Meta pull accurate product information from shopping sites for ads, not to scrape news sites. The company also said the crawling language already existed in other Meta terms and was just being gathered in one place.

Late Friday, however, Meta revised the terms and deleted the word “train,” saying the terms cover only its advertising and business products.

“We’ve heard you and want to clarify,” a spokesperson for Meta told POLITICO over the weekend, adding the change was “not about scraping news sites.”

Publishers say that changes little, however. 

Meta has given them verbal assurances that they can keep using its tools without surrendering their content to AI, but the terms themselves don’t guarantee that, the European Publishers Council’s letter says.

“Meta’s supposed Friday night correction is a farce,” said Jason Kint, who heads Digital Content Next, a U.S. publisher group whose members include Axel Springer. “Exactly what you’d expect from a gatekeeper notorious for abusing its market power.”

Others have gone further. 

“This is unscrupulous theft,” Germany’s newspaper and magazine associations said in a joint statement on Tuesday. They want Brussels to block the terms while it reviews them, warning that once articles are copied into AI systems, they can’t be clawed back.

Joseph Bambridge in London contributed reporting.

With Washington’s support for Kyiv increasingly uncertain, Brussels is looking to its allies to help keep Ukraine afloat. The price tag: €70 billion.

On today’s show, Zoya Sheftalovich and Kathryn Carlson discuss how the EU hopes to persuade Canada, Britain and Japan to help foot the bill — and whether closer trade and defense ties could be part of the bargain.

Then, Germany’s far-right AfD leader Alice Weidel is in Strasbourg to present her vision for a radically different European Union.

And who owns your face and voice in the age of AI? As deepfakes become increasingly convincing, MEPs are pushing for new protections.

If you have a question or comment, don’t hesitate! Message us on our WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29.

Articles mentioned in this episode:

• “AfD’s Alice Weidel to unveil plan to downsize the EU.”
• “Socialists push for EU law on deepfakes.”
• “EU to press Canada and UK for more Ukraine funding.”

The cyberattack last week that hit hundreds of French supermarket refrigerators had Europeans wondering if the nonstop warnings about AI risks had finally landed in the real world.

They hadn’t — at least, not yet.

Experts say the attack, which forced hundreds of retailers to throw away defrosted food and spoiled milk, was mostly a reminder of the importance of old-school cybersecurity in safeguarding essential goods and services.

The attack is a “typical example” of how “low-key cyber-enabled sabotage can affect very crucial supply for society,” said Ferdinand Gehringer, hybrid threats lead at FTI Consulting. 

It’s arguably the most consequential hack in the European Union this year, with tangible, disruptive real-world repercussions. France’s Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu personally managed the fallout, which prompted coordination and information-sharing at the EU level. 

The perpetrators, whose identity and motives are currently unknown, hacked into digital systems to remotely raise the temperature of refrigerators in supermarkets including Intermarché and Carrefour.

One cybersecurity expert working with Lecornu’s office said the French government held meetings after the attack to try to map all the potentially affected sectors, beyond supermarkets. “We’re in the middle of the flu vaccination campaign,” he said, referring to vaccine storage, which also relies on temperature control solutions, though no such attacks have been registered.

To add to the fear and confusion, supermarkets in the Netherlands and Belgium experienced unrelated cyber incidents that same week. Though there was limited impact in those cases, they were a good example of “how big our reliance is in the food supply chain on IT and network systems,” Dutch food security minister Silvio Erkens told POLITICO. 

The attacks come after citizens and policymakers have spent months being bombarded with warnings about scenarios in which unpredictable advanced artificial intelligence models escape human control.

While most good and bad actors on the internet are increasingly using AI models to increase speed and capacity, cyber experts say the hackers in question in the French case most likely used traditional methods to take advantage of devices needlessly exposed to the internet.

Connecting devices to the internet in this way is “an old-fashioned bad practice,” said Amir Preminger, chief technology officer at Claroty, a cybersecurity company that identified a software flaw in a product made by Danfoss, one of the refrigeration companies targeted by the French hacks. Danfoss fixed that flaw in 2025. 

Food systems

The attacks come at a time when Europe’s food security is already under considerable pressure due to geopolitical insecurity and climate change. The continuing disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz are pushing up fuel and fertilizer prices at a time where farmers struggle with the fallout of extreme drought that caused lower yields in many parts of Europe. These problems are compounded by the blockade of the Black Sea which is fueling the rise of global food prices.

“It is very serious that cyber criminals attack our food systems,” said Else Groen, director general of trade body Independent Retail Europe. She nonetheless stressed that food supply chains are resilient, which reduces the chances that consumer food supply would be endangered — even if such attacks are already a “major blow” for retailers operating on razor-thin margins.

The incidents bring to the fore a long-running problem with so-called operational technology, meaning industrial devices with physical outputs, like refrigeration systems. Critical sectors are packed with these kinds of devices, many of which are old, poorly protected, unnecessarily connected to the Internet, or some combination of the three. They’re also obscure and sometimes forgotten, despite the ramifications if they’re tampered with.  

And last week’s problems are far from solved. French and German cyber authorities warned that attacks were probably still ongoing, and the Greek cyber agency and an industry tracker said after the attack that there were hundreds of devices still connected to the internet.

Preminger too said there are still devices exposed, though he added that the number is declining, and not all are necessarily vulnerable to attack. Another research group found that the number of exposed Danfoss devices had significantly decreased.

Finding a fix

What’s changed with the widespread diffusion of advanced AI models is that cyber attacks are now faster and easier to replicate. Claroty reproduced the original flaws in Danfoss products in 28 minutes at a cost of $6, it said. 

In broad terms, AI makes it easier to carry out many types of cyberattacks and enables attackers to pounce on software flaws more quickly. Financially motivated cybercriminals — who have already spent years extorting businesses and disrupting essential services like hospitals — can use AI to simultaneously launch attacks on multiple targets.

Though the motive for the attacks on French supermarkets remains unknown, it is notable that there was no reported attempt at extortion. The strike did come as Russia ramps up its campaign of hybrid warfare against Europe, and senior EU and European leaders have consistently warned that Moscow could use cyberattacks to disrupt real-world services. Beyond food supplies, AI-enhanced targeting could be aimed at banking, hospitals and the functioning of the internet itself.

Still, these fears of bad human actors using AI should be distinguished from the science-fiction scenarios pushed by so-called AI doomers, in which bots themselves are motivated and able on their own to wipe out humanity.

Digital security experts, including the EU’s own in-house cyber team, are also turning to AI for defense. But it’s not a silver bullet, said Rémi Enjolras, a chief technology officer at Splunk, part of Cisco. Critical industries need to stop “seeing AI as a magical tool that will solve everything and go back to the fundamentals,” he said.

The EU has passed laws intended to force critical industries and product manufacturers to get those fundamentals right. But France, for example, is lagging in implementing such national regulations, and there are few other incentives to get companies to do that difficult and costly work.

Still, the images of empty supermarket shelves could provide a new incentive. “It should serve as a kind of a wake-up call,” Enjolras said.

Émile Marzolf contributed to this report.

DUBLIN — The Irish capital, which doubles as Europe’s de facto tech capital, hosted two very different AI summits in the past week.

Most eyes were on the International AI Summit, the signature tech event of Ireland’s six-month presidency of the Council of the EU, where top brass from the world’s biggest tech firms discussed ways to harness artificial intelligence and minimize safety risks.

But the weekend before, a very different conversation was taking place at the Workers’ AI Counter Summit, as Ireland’s tech workers demanded a say in how the burgeoning technology reshapes the workplace and society.

Ireland’s lucrative tech sector has been rattled by waves of AI-driven layoffs — and the country’s fledgling tech union has seen an exponential spike in sign-ups from workers who are worried about their future.  

There’s an “awakening” happening right now among workers in Ireland’s tech sector, and a growing “awareness that they’re not bulletproof,” said Sinéad Gibney, a social democrat lawmaker who previously worked for Google.  

“I do think what we will see is that parts of roles will be automated, which means that people will be competing more heavily for the same roles,” she said. “They won’t have the same labor power and therefore we’re going to see a drop in quality of work, we’re going to see more zero-hour contracts, in more places than we already see it.”

The labor movement brewing in Ireland, where many of the world’s tech giants have their EU bases, is part of a wider trend among tech workers globally, who have seen their work disrupted by rapidly evolving AI.

Rise in layoffs

Ireland’s dedicated union for tech workers, the Digital and Techworker Alliance (DATA), has seen a five-fold increase in membership since it was first founded in 2023.  

In its first year and a half of existence, membership hovered around 270 people. In the past year-and-a-half, it’s jumped to more than 1,350 members, DATA organizer John Bohan told POLITICO.  He added that this number tends to spike around layoffs and other actions.

“The tech industry was founded on the idea that it would never have a union, because they’re making people rich, and treat them really well,” Bohan said.  “But post-Covid, workforce adjustments happened again and again, with layoffs and declining conditions in the sector. We started to see more people wanting to get organized around redundancies.”  

The spike in sign-ups coincides with a wave of layoffs in Ireland’s tech bubble (and the tech sector globally), as companies corrected pandemic-era overhiring, and diverted investment to AI.  

Ireland hosts the EU headquarters of most of the world’s largest tech companies, and more than 170,000 people are employed in the tech sector, according to the country’s statistics institute.

Social media giant Meta has roughly halved its workforce in Ireland since the pandemic, axing well over 1,000 roles to offset AI investment and boost efficiency. Separately, Meta subcontractor Covalen also announced massive layoffs earlier this year, cutting more than 700 people.  

Video-sharing platform TikTok announced this year it would shed around 300 Irish jobs, mostly from its trust and safety team, shifting the work to other countries, outsourced vendors or automated AI solutions.  

A report by the IMF earlier this year warned that Ireland’s labor market is “relatively more exposed” to AI than many advanced economies, partly due to its concentration of tech workers.  

The AI race is also creating new jobs on the Irish market – as AI firms like Anthropic and OpenAI are setting up Irish bases and trying to lure Big Tech workers with even bigger salaries.  

Amid the uncertainty and volatility of the AI boom, tech workers are turning to unions for the first time as a safety net. One tech worker who used to work in trust and safety at a big tech firm told POLITICO that there used to be a feeling that as a “pampered” tech worker you “can’t ask for your rights, because you already have it so much better.” 

But as layoffs continue and teams get leaner, workers in fields like trust and safety “now have to deal with these issues with fewer and fewer resources”, and face a “constant threat of being chopped,” the worker said.  

That’s causing an “undoing of a certain perspective that we have of ourselves as tech sector workers,” they said, “because of undeniable experiences that now put us in situations where we clearly see our rights being violated, even if we may have it so much or somewhat better than most people.” 

A different tech worker who currently works for Covalen told POLITICO that there is a sense that “if they believe they can replace you with AI, they will do that.”  

“All these Big Tech firms only care about profit, and what I have realized is the Irish government protects that Big Tech capital [rather than workers],” the Covalen worker said. “But the question is, what’s the government going to do when the tech bros change their mind and move elsewhere?”  

Workers at the center

The speaker list at this week’s AI summit was a flex of the country’s strength as a tech hub, as top names from the world’s biggest companies like Google and Microsoft took to the stage.

Fionnuala Ní Bhrógáin, head of organizing and campaigning at Ireland’s Communications Workers’ Union (DATA’s parent union), was the only union voice on the line-up.

“The fact that 36 executives and industry bosses featured on the program, compared with just one trade union speaker — invited at the last minute after attention was drawn to the absence of workers’ voices — says a lot about the value the Irish government places on AI’s impact on workers,” she told POLITICO.

“The reality is that a meaningful conversation about AI’s future can only happen through genuine engagement with workers and collective bargaining,” Ní Bhrógáin added. “Without that voice, we risk deepening mistrust and resistance rather than creating the conditions for workers to shape these changes collectively.”

DATA organized its counter-AI summit the previous weekend, to put “workers at the center of the debate about power, AI, technology and the future of work.” 

The event cut through the “hype and futurism of politicians and industry figures to focus on the real present harms faced by ordinary workers and communities,” DATA’s Bohan said.  

The union is pushing for stronger legal protections for tech workers caught up in AI-driven layoffs in Ireland, including making it mandatory for employers to recognize unions during collective bargaining. It is also calling for a ban on cooling-off clauses that prevent laid-off workers from moving between Big Tech subcontractors.  

A spokesperson for Ireland’s department for enterprise told POLITICO in a written statement that the government is “committed to strengthening collective bargaining and industrial relations” and has published an action plan to do so between now and 2030.  

They said that employers already have to comply with obligations under Irish employment law, including consultation and notification procedures for collective redundancies, and workers who feel those rules have been broken can complain to the Workplace Relations Commission. 

Firefighting to future-proofing 

Naoise Ó Cearúil, a center-right Fianna Fáil lawmaker who chairs the AI committee, pointed out that while there have been high-profile job cuts in Ireland’s tech sector, “the actual net is that there has been an increase [in jobs], particularly over the past year and even five years.” 

According to Ireland’s central statistics office, total employment in tech and related sectors surpassed 177,000 in the second quarter of this year, up from around 144,000 at the same time in 2021.  

Ó Cearúil pointed out that many job losses were in trust and safety jobs like content moderation that are “very difficult mentally,” and now tech firms are able to “utilize AI and software to be able to do a lot of detection, rather than using humans.”  

He has called for a national program to be established, to support workers whose jobs are at risk due to AI and automation.  

A spokesperson for Ireland’s department of enterprise acknowledged that the country’s tech sector has “experienced significant adjustment in recent years,” but said the changes were generally part of wider global restructuring “rather than reflecting any Ireland-specific weakness.” 

They said the Irish government is currently focused on “ensuring workers and businesses are equipped to adapt to technological change through investment in education, training, lifelong learning and digital skills.”  

BRUSSELS — There is “no logic” to U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent moves to take Russia’s side in the Ukraine war, and he should remember his true allies lie in Europe, Finland’s prime minister said Thursday. 

In an exclusive interview with POLITICO, Petteri Orpo summed up the shock and dismay among Ukraine’s allies after Trump announced a diesel deal with Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, and reportedly imposed limits on Kyiv’s access to the military intelligence and technology needed to counter Russian attacks.

“My message to him [Trump] is that we are allies,” Orpo said on the sidelines of the European Council summit in Brussels. “We are in NATO. And what is the biggest threat against NATO? It’s Russia — and that is why there is no logic. I don’t have answers. I have many questions.” 

Trump alarmed European leaders and horrified Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this week by announcing a deal to release Russian diesel onto the market, apparently in an attempt to lower fuel costs for American consumers. Ukraine’s allies fear the move will boost Russia’s revenue from fuel sales, giving it more money to spend on war. 

Trump also said Ukraine should stop hitting Russian fossil fuel facilities — as part of what he said was a ceasefire on energy infrastructure — and should replace Zelenskyy. 

Finland is an influential voice among Ukraine’s European allies: The country has the EU’s longest land border with Russia, at 1,300 km, and its president, Alexander Stubb — a talented sportsman — won Trump’s respect on the golf course, giving him leeway to try to influence White House policy.

Orpo said if he were in Trump’s position “I would not trust Putin.” Zelenskyy has said he fears Ukraine is losing the U.S. to Russia’s side in the war, warning the Americans and their president are on “the wrong side of history”. Orpo said he agreed: “I think he is, and they are.” 

Ukraine now faces grave danger, he said. “The sky is open for Russia, there are missiles. They need more military support, air defense,” Orpo said. “Also, the situation is dangerous because of the latest deal between Trump and Putin.”

Midterms move

One possible reason Trump turned against Ukraine with that diesel deal is the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 3. “I think it is because of domestic reasons — elections are coming,” Orpo said. “But we need to get them back.” Nonetheless, he said the amount of Russian diesel that could be sold to the U.S. is too small to make much of a difference for American consumers. 

Whatever happens, EU leaders must equip Ukraine with weapons and cash, whether or not they can rely on the U.S., he said. “Today, we need to find a solution [on] how to support Ukraine, how to finance Ukraine in this winter, but also in next year,” Orpo said. “It’s crucial.”

Finland and Sweden are among the countries pushing the European Commission to reopen the fractious debate over how to use Russia’s financial assets currently frozen in European banks, especially in Belgium, which blocked a deal to raid the funds last year over legal concerns. 

“The best solution would be that we will have a solution on how to use frozen assets,” he said. “We have to try again,” Orpo said. 

Finland has asked the Commission “to continue work with Belgium, and the other member states, to find a solution.” He said he hoped to hear an update from the Commission during the summit. “It’s a better solution than using our own money.”

Budget blues

European leaders are arguing this week over their long-term budget, which Brussels officials want to finalize by the end of the year. Many diplomats do not expect a deal this year, and some leaders say they’re in no hurry. 

But others want the budget, worth around €2 trillion, signed off by December because they fear next year’s European elections — especially if far-right leader Marine Le Pen wins the French presidency — will derail negotiations. 

The longer budget negotiations last, the “more difficulties we will have,” Orpo said. “So we have to work to find a solution this year. I understand very well that it is difficult, a huge challenge, but I cannot see how it would be easier next year, because in France elections are coming, for example.”

Finland also has an election coming up in April 2027. Orpo’s center-right National Coalition Party is struggling in the polls. “This time has been very difficult,” he said. “But, finally, our economy is growing.”

Orpo’s Swedish sister party, the Moderates, mounted a late surge in last month’s election. Although that seems unlikely to keep them in office, Sweden’s Moderates still have a slim chance, even though many commentators had written them off long before the vote.

“They did excellent campaign work, and in the end of the day, people vote Moderates, not populist or socialist,” Orpo said. “I would like the same in Finland.”

An Israeli surveillance technology firm has run a large-scale operation to infect mobile phones with spyware using online advertisements to hack the devices, researchers said on Thursday.

An investigation by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and cybersecurity firm Confiant Threat Intelligence laid bare an ad-based infection technique developed by an Israeli company that researchers named “AdFection.” The hacks weaponized legitimate online ad systems for espionage purposes, allowing spyware manufacturers to connect to millions of devices and identify, track and target victims.

“Plugging into the online ads ecosystem provides the mercenary spyware industry a stealthy delivery system,” said Bill Marczak, senior researcher at The Citizen Lab. He said the findings were “surely just the tip of the iceberg” of how online ads are abused for espionage.

Researchers discovered critical details of the hacking tools by analyzing devices belonging to journalists and staff at the Al Jazeera media network, finding that 45 devices of journalists and staff were targeted and some infected with Israeli-made spyware known as Candiru.

At the heart of the hacking campaign is the Israeli company Discover-Tech that describes itself as an advertising business. Citizen Lab researchers said the company facilitated surveillance for commercial spyware operators. Its platform, called Controlium, allegedly allowed spyware makers like Candiru — which in 2025 was acquired by Integrity Labs — to identify, track and target devices by loading advertisements on websites and apps.

Discover-Tech and Integrity Labs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The scale is striking: An analysis of four billion advertising records found that Discover-Tech’s ads appeared across nearly 200,000 websites and mobile apps in dozens of countries over four months. Among the websites that featured the ads were institutional sites of NATO, the United Nations, the European Parliament, European Commission and Council of the EU.

The technique exploits real-time bidding — the automated system used by platforms such as Google to sell advertising space and target users. Rather than persuading victims to click a malicious link, attackers can exploit advertisements to identify and potentially infect devices without any interaction from the user — a technique known as “zero-click” infections.

Discover-Tech’s advertisements directed millions of devices to servers associated with Candiru, potentially enabling large-scale surveillance and reconnaissance, researchers said. That does not mean all those devices were infected.

Citizen Lab, based in Toronto, is a globally recognized research group that previously uncovered spyware scandals targeting Catalan political figures, a member of the European Parliament and the inner circle of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The findings triggered calls for further investigation on Thursday. “The possibility that EU institutions have been exposed should set off alarm bells across Brussels,” said Hannah Neumann, a German European Parliament lawmaker of the Greens group. Neumann herself was the victim of a cyber-espionage operation by an Iranian hacking group.

“Europe cannot claim to defend democracy while leaving its own democratic institutions vulnerable to spyware,” Neumann said.

Ukraine’s strikes on data centers inside Russia aimed to disrupt military planning and communication services. There were also reports of another kind of disruption: to customers waiting for their dinner from food-delivery apps.

Kyiv’s drone strikes on three Yandex data centers in Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir saw delays and interruptions for thousands of businesses and households that rely on Yandex’s cloud infrastructure, including e-commerce, digital payment platforms and apps of food delivery and car services. Ukrainian drones on Wednesday targeted a major Sberbank data center in Russia’s Saratov region, though a senior company executive said it hadn’t affected operations.

After the strikes on Russian data centers, Kyiv noted that Moscow has already repeatedly targeted its digital infrastructure. “Ukrainians wanted to show Russians that two can play this game,” a senior official familiar with the operation told POLITICO, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The attacks and counter-attacks point to a new frontline in war: the infrastructure powering the digital economy.

The attacks on the buildings that supply compute power are akin to striking a power plant supplying the electricity, heating and fuel that both militaries and civilians depend on. It may weaken an enemy’s war effort but can also bring everyday life to a standstill.

Experts say the cost of rebuilding in Russia will be particularly high as the centers require scarce materials that must be imported. “Obtaining a large amount of equipment to replace what was destroyed is not going to be easy,” said Oleg Shakirov, a cyber policy and international security researcher, noting that most hardware needs to be imported and that is complicated by high global demand and sanctions on Russia.

“To be honest, no one really knows what’s the actual damage. Since two data centers are still offline, we can assume that it’s significant,” said Shakirov.

Joseph Jarnecki, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, warned that normalizing strikes to data centers could have a new set of dangerous consequences.

“These strikes likely breach International Humanitarian Law and it’s a big risk when global populations increasingly rely on digital services,” he told POLITICO.

When servers become targets

Data centers have entered the crosshairs of other recent armed conflicts. During the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran earlier this year, drone strikes hit three Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

Since data centers can serve civilian and military purposes simultaneously, the legal status of targeting them is far from straightforward.

Kubo Mačák, an expert on international humanitarian law, said a data center must meet two conditions to qualify as a military objective under the Geneva Conventions: it must make an effective contribution to military operations and destroying it must offer a “definite military advantage.”

“If you know that they are storing military intelligence or that they’re using the data center to power military artificial intelligence tools,” Mačák said, there could be grounds to consider it a military objective.

Following the most recent strikes of the Yandex data centers, users on social media platform X reported a sudden drop in automated bot activity, including from accounts associated with pro-Russian, pro-Trump and Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) narratives.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy seized on the reports to boast that the strikes had made social media less toxic, even as independent researchers and national research institutes found no evidence they specifically disrupted any Russian disinformation campaigns.

Mačák said that even if a data center is being used to “let’s say, run some trolls or these bot farms to interfere with elections abroad … that would not be sufficient.” In other words, hosting propaganda bots does not, by itself, make a data center a lawful military target.

The dual-use quandary has often focused on the targeting of energy infrastructure, which has been frequent in the Russia-Ukraine war. On Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump urged Ukraine to stop striking Russian oil refineries, blaming the attacks for rising fuel prices. He has since called for both sides to halt attacks on energy infrastructure, although the existence of any ceasefire agreement remains disputed.

As data centers become increasingly central to national economies, they will become more consequential targets. A senior NATO official granted anonymity to discuss the matter told POLITICO that data centers are already considered potential targets and that the alliance is factoring their vulnerability into its planning.

NATO allies recognize that their data centers could come under attack in a conflict, the official said: “We would get it in a fight.”

Veronika Melkozerova in Kyiv contributed to this report.

LONDON — The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan and U.S. tech company Palantir have agreed to drop legal proceedings relating to a blocked £50 million police contract.

Palantir brought a claim against the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime in the High Court in June after Khan’s deputy mayor refused to sign off on the £50 million contract with the Metropolitan Police for the provision of an AI and data analysis service.

In July, lawyers working on behalf of MOPAC in turn accused the Met Police and Palantir of coordinating to fix the outcome of the procurement process in breach of the rules. Palantir claimed Khan’s office had unlawfully blocked the contract over the company’s “values and ethics,” based on media reporting.

A full trial was expected in January but on Wednesday both sides agreed to “settle their differences” and drop the allegations without admitting liability. They will each cover their own legal costs.

In an agreed statement, the two sides said MOPAC’s decision to block the Palantir contract was “not based on Palantir’s values or ethics or any wider reporting about the company,” though MOPAC said it “recognizes Palantir’s concerns that media reporting of a statement from the Mayor’s spokesperson before the decision was taken could have incorrectly created the impression that an assessment of the company’s values had been a factor in that decision.”

“MOPAC’s consideration was based upon its statutory role of examining spend proposals, against the appropriate legal tests and the relevant guidance on procurement, governance, affordability and ensuring value for money for Londoners and in doing so it focussed on the available information at the time,” the statement said.

The settlement also notes that MOPAC is working with Metropolitan Police Service to re-run a competitive procurement for the relevant service, which Palantir will be eligible to bid for.

“MOPAC does not have, and has never had, any policy of not contracting with Palantir,” the statement confirms, while noting the mayor’s duty is to ensure “all procurements are lawful, fair, transparent and deliver value for money.”

“London is the technology capital of Europe, and I am proud that leading software firms choose the city as their home. Palantir makes a significant contribution to jobs and investment in the capital, employing a large number of Londoners whose services have been procured legally by organizations across the U.K. and beyond,” Khan said.