AI power concentrates in a handful of firms with unprecedented influence over markets, public discourse, and policy. Open alternatives are starved of capital and compute. Democratic institutions struggle to hold AI firms accountable.
AI power is distributed across a healthy ecosystem of commercial, open-source, public, and cooperative actors. Antitrust and competition policy apply. Democratic institutions retain capacity to govern.
A new report reveals that a lobbying group representing major tech companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta, successfully secured a provision in the EU to keep data center environmental impact data confidential.
The European Commission has awarded a €180 million cloud computing contract to four European providers, aiming to bolster sovereign infrastructure.
The European Commission proposed measures under the Digital Markets Act to mandate Google's sharing of search engine data with third parties.
Political action committees representing the crypto and AI industries have raised $250 million ahead of the US midterm elections.
A federal district court ruled that Perplexity's AI-enabled browser violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by accessing Amazon's website to help users comparison shop. The EFF has filed an amicus brief supporting Perplexity's appeal to the Ninth Circuit, arguing the decision harms competition and innovation.
Anthropic opened applications for its next Fellows cohorts beginning May and July 2026. 4-month program, $3,850/week stipend + ~$15k/mo compute funding + mentorship for independent safety researchers. 40% of first-cohort fellows joined Anthropic full-time; 80%+ produced papers.
Mistral AI secured €722M ($830M) in debt financing from seven-bank consortium led by Bpifrance and BNP Paribas to build a 44MW data center near Paris with 13,800 Nvidia GB300 GPUs (Q2 2026 target). Largest AI-focused debt raise by a European technology company to date; targets 200MW capacity by end-2027.
On Jan 8, 2026 the Commission published the summary of 450+ contributions to its DMA review consultation (ran Jul-Sep 2025, with dedicated AI questionnaire launched Aug 26, 2025). AI emerged as the most prevalent theme; respondents split on whether to add a standalone AI Core Platform Service category. Article 53 report due May 3, 2026.
Nevada AB73 became effective Jan 1, 2026, requiring "clear and conspicuous" disclosure when synthetic/AI-generated media is used in political communications. Unanimously passed; gives depicted candidates injunctive relief against undisclosed AI manipulation. Part of a broader wave of state deepfake-political laws.
On Dec 5, 2025 the Council published conclusions on European Competitiveness in the Digital Decade, urging open standards, interoperability and reduced vendor lock-in in cloud, AI, cybersecurity and connectivity; asks Commission to develop common criteria for sovereign cloud services ahead of the forthcoming Cloud and AI Development Act (Commission proposal due Q1 2026).
On Nov 17, 2025, House Majority Leader Scalise confirmed to Punchbowl News that House GOP leaders are exploring attaching AI preemption language to the FY26 National Defense Authorization Act. Congressional Progressive Caucus and states-rights Republicans lined up against.
DeepSeek released V3.2-Exp on Sep 29, 2025 under MIT license, debuting DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) for long-context efficiency and cutting API prices 50%+ immediately. Full V3.2 shipped Dec 1, 2025 (with V3.2-Speciale reasoning variant).
In September 2025 Microsoft and OpenAI signed a non-binding MOU to restructure their nearly $13B relationship, enabling OpenAI to transition toward a for-profit entity with freedom to partner with rival cloud providers. The restructuring was driven by threat of a formal FTC merger challenge treating multi-billion-dollar exclusive licensing as an undisclosed merger.
First OpenAI open-weight release since GPT-2. 117B and 21B total-parameter MoE reasoning models (5.1B and 3.6B active), Apache 2.0 license, near-parity with o4-mini / o3-mini on core benchmarks. Runs on single 80GB GPU / 16GB consumer hardware respectively.
Senate voted 99-1 during vote-a-rama to strike the Blackburn/Cantwell (bipartisan) amendment removing the 10-year (later 5-year) federal preemption of state AI laws from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Only Sen. Tillis (R-NC) voted no.