The first thing I noticed when I gave up American technology was the silence.

My phone usually starts up before I get out of bed, buzzing every few minutes throughout the day with calls, messages, headlines, calendar reminders and social media alerts. It’s a constant pulse that averages nearly 200 iPhone notifications on weekends and twice as many Monday-to-Friday.

But on this warm mid-summer Sunday, my life was on an unlikely version of mute. After years of reporting on Europe’s push to wean itself off U.S. tech giants and cultivate homegrown alternatives, I had decided to test my own daily habit by cutting myself off from using any American technology for 72 hours.

No iPhone. No Mac. No Slack or Teams. No Google Search or Maps. No ChatGPT. No WhatsApp or Signal. No Facebook or Instagram feeds. No credit card payments.

I wondered if I would turn into a digital monk.

For three days, I set out to live and work in Brussels as if U.S. tech had suddenly become unavailable to me overnight. It was a purposefully fictional scenario rooted in a very real European anxiety: what happens if Washington weaponizes our continent’s Silicon Valley dependence and reaches for the tech “kill switch?”

Limited versions of that scenario have already surfaced. When U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration cut off French-born International Criminal Court judge Nicolas Guillou from U.S.-linked financial and technology services, he called it a form of “civil death.”

Meanwhile, U.S. export controls in June forced Anthropic to block foreign nationals from accessing two of its most advanced AI models, offering a glimpse of what government bans on access to cutting-edge technology can look like.

Such episodes feed into mounting fears that the Trump administration could use Europe’s overreliance on U.S. tech as leverage in trade fights or disputes over EU regulations. A Proton survey released earlier this month found that 74 percent of European business leaders worry such a cutoff could disrupt their operations.

In my own little experiment, the stakes were much lower. Yet I was about to find out that replacing American tools with those built here in Europe was going to make almost everything harder — and lonelier.

Trying to live without U.S. tech, I would find out, essentially amounts to trying to live without tech at all. That was partly because, like virtually all of my fellow Europeans, I had locked myself into those consumer choices.

Dumbphones and FOMO

The early symptoms of going cold turkey looked suspiciously like withdrawal.

On that first morning, with my iPhone shut off, I reached for a Nokia brick from Finland. The so-called dumbphone is the type of device now enjoying a second life among people detoxing from screen time and is also a favorite of drug dealers seeking to avoid getting busted by any tracking and data collection.

Several hours in, I realized there were no notifications on the Nokia. Nobody calls or texts anymore. Then came the shameful part: a sense of helplessness, followed by FOMO-fueled restlessness. The world had surely kept spinning at full speed, and I was missing it. For the next few days, I would still catch myself checking the phone compulsively like an addict.

“The phone aged you instantly,” my best friend joked later that day as we traded our now-standard FaceTime video calls for a regular one. It was unclear whether he meant the muffled audio or me struggling with a new-but-actually-old device, or both.

I did notice that I was pacing up and down my flat because my usually overstimulated brain apparently couldn’t handle focusing on a voice-only call.

One instant benefit from my dumbphone: no doomscrolling in bed.

It all took me back to my first cellphone at 13, when texting meant tapping the same tiny key several times for a single letter, every SMS cost money and abbreviations and emojis were not just stylistic choices but ways to squeeze more into a message.

I knew my social media life would be at risk in my experiment. European alternatives such as Mastodon have gained traction since Elon Musk turned Twitter into X. But who joins a social network when none of their friends are there?

That was fine. I was actually eager to disappear for a while, well aware of the anxiety social media induces in me and the insecurities created by constantly watching other people’s supposedly perfect lives.

Online shopping was out — but so too was paying by card in stores and restaurants. The payment networks I rely on are American: Visa and Mastercard dominate card payments across Europe, meaning that even a purchase made with a European bank card often still runs over U.S.-controlled rails.

It meant I had to buy everything using cash, which I hadn’t done regularly in ages. Fortunately, unlike in some other European countries, Belgian legislation requires merchants to accept banknotes. The hard part was finding some of those stores without the help of Google Maps, which I’d come to rely on almost as much as my credit cards.

The invisible grip

Swearing off Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and YouTube was also part of the deal — already eliminating a sizable chunk of my leisure time. But it turned out I could barely watch anything at all, or even properly test European streaming platforms, because my television and tablet both ran on Google software.

Thankfully, an offline Nintendo Switch from Japan, good old books and the legendary Snake game kept me company.

These invisible dependencies run deep. Beyond the products we use every day, U.S. systems often serve as gateways to European companies trying to take on Big Tech.

Take Sweden’s Spotify or the Estonia-based rival to Uber, Bolt. Both still heavily rely on U.S.-controlled app stores, operating systems, payment networks and other digital infrastructure.

And then there is the cloud: the data centers and servers that host websites, process data and route traffic. The vast majority of that market is dominated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, whose infrastructure supports large parts of Europe’s digital economy.

Many corners of Europe would go dark if those services were shut down, with its economy, public administration and communications infrastructure struggling to function normally.

Working outside the stack

On Monday morning, I walked into the office with the slightly misplaced confidence that I had prepared for everything. My efficiency at work, admittedly during a very quiet summer week, took less of a hit than I expected.

I was still working from the office. I used an open-source, Linux-powered computer. I communicated by email through a Switzerland-based Proton address, browsed the web using the Norwegian browser Vivaldi and French search engine Qwant, wrote everything in LibreOffice and even tried Mistral’s generative AI assistant. And there was always a good old notebook.

I felt productive. But the workflow around me was not. The tools themselves worked perfectly well once I accepted that breaking years of habits would take time. The disruption ultimately came from stunted collaboration: meetings, messages, shared documents and the constant stream of small exchanges that keep a newsroom moving.

“It was like you disappeared,” one colleague would tell me later.

European alternatives do exist in that space. The problem is, just like for social media, they only work properly when everyone else uses them too or when competing systems are interoperable — something the EU has long tried to legislate and enforce, often against resistance from large technology platforms.

For this little while, despite technically being able to continue working, I became an outsider within my own team. I had to skip our routine video meetings on Slack and Teams, while missing messages sent over WhatsApp and Signal.

In a trade, a city and an era built around instant messaging, sending a good old SMS felt almost prehistoric — a reminder of the longstanding complaints from the European telecom industry about losing messaging and calling revenues to U.S. tech firms.

Ultimately, this underscored one of the major pinch points in Europe’s push for greater tech independence: digital sovereignty is not an individual project. It only works if people, companies and institutions move together.

On their own, individual efforts are more likely to leave people feeling digitally isolated rather than digitally sovereign.

Relax and relapse

And yet, there was something blissful about these three days.

The initial anxiety slowly gave way to a kind of peace. Of course, that feeling may only reflect that the experiment was temporary and my digital life had not been erased.

The experience nevertheless highlighted how much I had taken these tools for granted. I have placed all my eggs in the same digital basket: my communication channels, the tools I use to authenticate myself and access the digital world, my polished digital self and years of accumulated knowledge, all stored inside one sprawling digital safe.

The concern is no longer simply whether that safe could be broken into from the outside. It is also whether somebody could lock it — or empty it — from within.

Now, as you might wonder how I’ll act on what I’ve learned, I am strangely reminded of Covid.

Many of us emerged from that temporary era of lockdowns and involuntary limits full of healthy new habits and grand ideas about how our lifestyles should change, only to return remarkably quickly to our old routines.

Sadly, the same thing happened here. My iPhone came straight back into my pocket. Messages began flowing through again. My bank card returned to its usual place. Within hours, I had fallen comfortably back into the U.S. technology stack.

As I switched my smartphone back on, my screen lit up with incoming texts inquiring whether my little experiment was over. After 72 hours of old-school SMS exchanges, two different friends were both clearly eager to return to reality, sending me the same final text: “Back to WhatsApp?”

LONDON — The personal mobile phone numbers of three U.K. Cabinet ministers — including Defense Secretary Wes Streeting — have been found published online alongside their names.

The discovery comes after POLITICO reported that Prime Minister Andy Burnham fell victim to a texting scam — engaging with messages from someone impersonating Susie Wiles, Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, before becoming suspicious the contact was illegitimate and ending the conversation.

After checking through a list of Cabinet members, POLITICO found three published on the web, for Streeting, Justice Secretary Alex Norris and Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Bryant. POLITICO is not pointing to where the numbers can be found to avoid further risking security.

All three ministers declined to comment on the record. The reference to Streeting’s number online has since been deleted, and officials are working to remove the other two.

Ministers are given secure government devices to conduct business for their briefs, in particular for high-risk roles like defense, and are expected to use those for non-personal comms.

A government spokesperson said: “The government has robust procedures in place to ensure the security of sensitive information.”

But Prerana Joshi, research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank, said that having direct numbers for Cabinet ministers in the public domain is a risk, warning that numbers could be spoofed and used to call others at a time when the U.K. is “in a high threat situation” globally.

“In any civil space, if your number is exposed, a whole host of malign, nefarious or even opportunistic cyber criminals or cyber actors could get hold of it, and they have tactics,” Joshi said.

‘No significance’

Downing Street would not comment on the revelation that Burnham exchanged messages with the impersonator, citing “national security.”

One person briefed on the communications said a “few messages” were exchanged after the PM entered No. 10 but insisted they were “of no significance.”

It is unclear how the fraudster obtained Burnham’s number. POLITICO could not find it published online.

British officials initially feared Wiles’ phone had been hacked again. But a White House official said: “This incident had nothing to do with the Chief of Staff’s devices being hacked.”

It is not clear whether Burnham will change his phone number, as Boris Johnson did after the Popbitch newsletter revealed in 2021 that the then-prime minister’s details had been sitting online for years.

‘Full of traps’

The episode has sharpened questions over whether Burnham — who built his political brand on his informal style and being more approachable than other prime ministers — can carry on that way in No. 10.

A former national security adviser, granted anonymity to speak frankly, said the prime minister needs to “get into the habit” of having his security staff verify that messages reaching him are authentic.

National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell “could have phoned the White House in five minutes and checked whether Susie Wiles genuinely was texting the prime minister,” they said.

“Being a domestic politician and going on listening tours around the U.K. is one thing, but when you engage in the international world, it’s full of traps and full of risks,” the former adviser added.

“What starts off as a very informal chat can quickly get into some kind of business, and you could give away key details of an upcoming trip or the movements of Donald Trump,” they said.

Former Defense Secretary Ben Wallace — himself targeted by imposters posing as Ukraine’s prime minister in 2022 — said the incident “demonstrates our adversaries are always looking for weak points in our communications.”

While Downing Street has said nothing significant was discussed in the exchanges between Burnham and the imposter, Wallace said “there is always a risk of kompromat” being obtained by hostile actors.

As technology, such as AI voice cloning, improves, these sort of incidents are going to “happen more and more,” Wallace added.

Others have urged Burnham not to change tack.

Guto Harri, Johnson’s former director of communications, said: “It’s only a threat and it’s only an embarrassment if they give something away — and it doesn’t seem that he’s done anything like that.”

Harri said it was “good to have someone big enough not to have his calls screened from everyone” as prime minister.

“I don’t think it’s healthy that the civil service wants to control all access to the principal. If they had their way, nobody would be able to talk to a prime minister without going through them,” he said.

“We can’t say that politicians are not living in the same world as us … and then moan about them speaking to people like a normal human being.”

Harri conceded a new number might be a “good idea,” giving the prime minister a “clean slate.”

Dan Bloom contributed to this report.

NATO plans to fortify its eastern edge using drones, sensors and artificial intelligence in a massive network designed to spot and help repel a potential Russian attack.

Western officials say the alliance is exploring AI-assisted drone operations as part of the broad effort to bolster its defenses. The aim, however, isn’t full autonomy; instead, machines could help to pilot the drones while human operators make the call on what they strike.

The approach echoes what Ukraine is already doing. The embattled country is increasingly incorporating AI into its drone operations, but both soldiers and defense tech firms have repeatedly emphasized that humans must remain at the center of the fight, even as the war becomes more robotic.

For NATO, AI-assisted drones would be part of the Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative — a digital battlespace network the alliance is building to track threats along its borders with Russia and Belarus, which stretch from northern Finland to the Black Sea.

The new concept includes thousands of drones, sensors and satellites linked with AI to detect potential breaches of allied territory and repel attacks as the first line of defense. Conventional military forces, such as tanks, fighter jets and artillery, will remain the backbone.

U.S. Army Maj. Ben Schiff, a software operations officer, told Bild — which, like Business Insider and POLITICO, is part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network — that both Ukraine and Russia still rely on humans to control drones.

While some systems have AI or machine-learning capabilities that allow brief moments of autonomy in flight, piloting is primarily performed by operators on the ground. Schiff said that “the most boring parts of flying”— drones loitering above the battlefield looking for targets — should be automated. But when it comes to deciding what the drone should strike, that’s where a human comes into play.

“So the humans are deciding what the drone does, but they don’t necessarily need to take the action of flying it because we don’t have a million pilots. We can’t fly a million drones at the same time,” said Schiff at the U.S. Army Europe and Africa headquarters in Wiesbaden, Germany.

Schiff is a product manager for the EFDI Data Backbone, a developing framework designed to help NATO forces detect, classify, share and act on information at speed and scale. The backbone bridges incompatible computer and command systems across multiple allied nations, allowing real-time data to flow from forward-deployed sensors all the way back to headquarters.

The goal is to help NATO move beyond today’s linear system — called a “kill chain” — where information moves from the front line back to a decision-maker and then back again to the battlefront to a “kill web,” where data from sensors can be rapidly passed to weapons systems and operators.

“The value of a drone, sensor or other capability is not determined solely by its individual performance,” said Maj. Matt Blubaugh, a spokesperson for U.S. Army Europe and Africa. “Its effectiveness depends on how well it integrates into the broader operational ecosystem.”

Learning from Ukraine

Ukraine is already pioneering the integration of AI into military operations.

On the battlefield, Ukraine has made significant progress in using AI to support functions like decision-making, drone navigation, terminal guidance and precision, said Andrii Hrytseniuk, the CEO of the Ukrainian state-backed innovation platform Brave1.

This spring, Hrytseniuk told Business Insider in Kyiv that more than 200 local companies were developing AI-based components for drones, missiles, radars and other systems. However, they insist machines won’t control drones from start to finish.

Wild Hornets, the manufacturer of the popular Sting interceptor drone, also told Business Insider in May that AI will be gradually integrated at almost every stage of flight operations — target detection, identification and, later, terminal guidance.

A spokesperson for the company said humans will still make the final decision on what to strike. Since Russia is constantly changing its tactics, interceptor operators must keep tabs on these changes and make necessary adjustments, they said.

As autonomous systems become more common on the battlefield in Ukraine, commanders also told Business Insider that humans need to remain in the loop.

Grek, the call sign of a company commander overseeing robots with Ukraine’s 21st Unmanned Systems “Kraken” Regiment, said the goal is to “allow people to focus on the tasks where human judgment has the greatest value.”

U.S. Army officers stressed that NATO is using the operational environment in Ukraine to inform military planning for a potential future confrontation.

“We’re not copying Ukraine,” said Capt. Ronan Sefton. “We’re learning from Ukraine.”

The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, The Telegraph, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.

President Donald Trump is paving a legal pathway for U.S. companies to launch cyberattacks on foreign cybercriminal gangs — a significant and potentially controversial measure that would put approved tech and cybersecurity firms on the front lines of digital combat.

The presidential memorandum, released late Wednesday, comes as the Trump administration has repeatedly pushed for more aggressive action to counter foreign scams and cyberattacks, which the White House said cost Americans nearly $21 billion last year.

The memo represents one of the biggest shifts in U.S. cyber policy undertaken in recent years. It would empower tech and security companies — whose data and control over internet infrastructure often offer unique insight into foreign hacking operations — to mount state-sanctioned digital strikes.

While many such companies already work closely with U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, a web of legal and political constraints has long prevented them from taking direct action inside foreign networks.

Companies that want to participate would be required to sign contracts with both the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security and to undergo what the memo describes as “rigorous vetting” while working with the government. The overall effort would be overseen by a National Coordination Center, established in an earlier Trump administration executive order, with co-executive directors from DOJ and DHS.

However, the memo states that no operations by the companies would be approved until the executive directors at DOJ and DHS establish “consensus procedures” with the White House Homeland Security Council guaranteeing “complete oversight and control of Participating Companies’ performance.”

Those procedures, it notes, should be drafted within 60 days. They are likely to be extensive.

They will outline steps for participating companies to obtain approval for proposed offensive hacking operations, so the government can confirm that the targets are criminal gangs and ensure that operations are consistent with U.S. law and don’t undermine ongoing U.S. intelligence efforts. Companies could propose surveillance operations to help identify criminals or “effects” operations to degrade the systems they use to stage their attacks.

Participating companies would have to pass minimum standards for technical expertise and personnel vetting, and would be required to notify the federal government if they believe approved operations may result in the loss of life or rise to the level of use of force under international law.

Some see the memo as a critical step to help the U.S. government counter foreign cybercriminal gangs that operate outside the reach of U.S. law enforcement.

“For years we’ve called the American technology industry a strategic asset but left it on the cyber sidelines,” Joe Lin, the CEO and co-founder of Twenty, a start-up that builds offensive cyber tools for the U.S. government, said in a statement. “This administration is changing the paradigm.”

The memo notes that companies will only be authorized to target criminals that are “not an institutional part of a foreign government or wholly operated under a foreign government’s direction.”

Even with the help of the U.S. intelligence community, making that distinction could be difficult.

Adversaries such as Russia, China and Iran have persistently targeted U.S. critical infrastructure, including water systems, ports, and telecommunications infrastructure, while multinational crime syndicates have defrauded billions of dollars annually from Americans via complex online schemes.

But many cyber gangs in Eastern Europe are thought to operate with the tacit consent of the Russian government, while state hackers in Iran and China sometimes moonlight as cybercriminals to earn extra money or deflect blame for their governments’ attacks.

More broadly, it is not always easy for digital investigators to determine who is responsible for a given cyberattack, or who different computer networks belong to — another risk the memo contemplates.

Companies that accidentally carry out operations targeting a U.S. citizen or network will be required to immediately pause the operation and notify the U.S. government, the memo states. It does not appear to preclude activities that are deliberately “directed” at a U.S. person, so long as they receive “any necessary authorization, judicial or otherwise, prior to approval of the operation.” Under U.S. law, a “U.S. person” can refer to an American business or organization.

Many lawmakers and security experts have broadly supported calls for the private sector to play a larger role in responding to cybercrime, though not all approve of granting them the ability to launch active hacking efforts.

In recent years, some House members have debated the idea of issuing “letters of marque” to private companies to carry out cyberattacks on behalf of the U.S. government, similar to the U.S. Navy authorizing private ships to disrupt British shipping during the War of 1812.

As part of a more assertive cyber posture, Trump has turned to U.S. Cyber Command to mount digital attacks in tandem with U.S. military operations, including in Iranand Venezuela. He signed an executive order this March to clamp down on countries that fail to take action against scam centers operating within their borders.

That same month, the White House called on the private sector to broadly help it “disrupt” foreign adversaries in its new national cyber strategy, though it stopped short of telling private companies to take riskier and more consequential steps, such as directly launching attacks against foreign criminals.

Some of the most prolific online fraud operations are believed to emanate from scam compounds in Southeast Asia. But hackers from North Korea — who for years have stolen hundreds of millions in cryptocurrency from victims around the world — would likely be exempt from targeting by U.S. companies since they work at the direction of the North Korean government.

A plan to ramp up the data processing powers of the EU’s policing agency Europol poses “serious risks” to people’s privacy, Europe’s data protection supervisor warned Thursday.

The European Commission in June unveiled a plan to make Europol the central system for police forces to trade and analyse data using the latest technologies — part of a wider strategy to give EU justice agencies more firepower to tackle cross-border crime and terrorism.

The reforms include a fundamental shift in how Europol sifts through the data it collects, relaxing current rules that require data to be sorted into different categories before determining if Europol can legally use it. That’s been a “key operational bottleneck,” the Commission has said, since Europol deals with high volumes of unstructured data.

In an opinion published Thursday, the European Data Protection Supervisor Wojciech Wiewiórowski said that the proposal “creates serious risks, particularly regarding the processing of the personal data of individuals with no established criminal links.”

The proposal would allow Europol to retain data on a “vast” number of people with no links to criminal activity “for an extensive and unspecified period of time,” the supervisor warned.

The EDPS is the data protection authority that supervises EU institutions including Europol and advises the Commission on the privacy implications of legislative reforms.

The privacy watchdog acknowledged that Europe’s security architecture needs to be developed to protect against increasingly complex criminal threats, but underlined that the proposed Europol reform “must provide robust safeguards and real oversight.”

A Berlin-based non-profit has filed a criminal complaint against Meta’s smart glasses, arguing the devices breach Germany’s strict privacy rules and should be banned.

Privacy concerns over the device have snowballed in recent months amid reports of people being filmed without their consent, or recording intimate footage without knowing it could be reviewed by Meta contractors.

The non-profit HateAid is arguing that the sale of Meta smart glasses in Germany is a criminal offense because the devices allow wearers to covertly film other people.

The complaint, which alleges the sale breaches Germany’s Telecommunications, Digital Services and Data Protection Act, was filed against Meta, Ray-Ban and Oakley — eyewear brands that have partnered with Meta to design the glasses — and several retailers.

Meta spokesperson Matthew Pollard said the smart glasses were approved by Germany’s regulator BNetzA in 2022, and “were built with privacy safeguards from the ground up that go beyond what any smartphone offers.” Those include an LED light that turns on when the glasses are recording, as well as technology to stop anyone from tampering with the light.

HateAid said that smart glasses should only be sold if they are clearly identifiable, and that there should be limits on recording in certain spaces as there is for dashcams or bodycams.

Europe’s privacy regulators have commissioned a report on smart glasses that is due to be finalized this summer.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday passionately defended the use of artificial intelligence, as the rapid advancement of the technology faces increased scrutiny — and calls for regulation — in the U.S. and globally.

In a 6,500 word post timed to the announcement of his company’s new open source version of its own model, Muse Spark, Zuckerberg detailed his vision for AI, arguing the technology is not to be feared and pushing back on concerns that superintelligence could strip people of jobs.

“The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes.”

Zuckerberg’s vision is a direct contrast to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s, who has previously warned how AI could cause job disruption. Meta lags behind Anthropic and OpenAI, which have the most advanced AI models.

While Zuckerberg’s essay did not name Amodei or OpenAI directly, he called to broadly distribute superintelligent AI for economic opportunity. Doing so, Zuckerberg said, would provide a safety net to prevent just a handful of governments, businesses and other institutions holding too much power.

Still, Zuckerberg emphasized that the U.S. must address restrictions on AI companies in order to create the best models in the world.

“It is also important that the US and its allies lead the open source AI ecosystem that will make up a large percent of global AI use,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Foreign labs currently hold several advantages here since American labs have to comply with many additional restrictions on training data.”

Zuckerberg’s essay comes amid growing concerns around AI safety. Last month, Anthropic revealed that several of its advanced models gained access to three organizations in three separate incidents dating back to April. That hack came shortly after OpenAI said that two of its most powerful models escaped a testing environment and breached multiple companies.

Lawmakers last month introduced a bill that would give the government power to restrict the use of models that could lead to catastrophic risks. While it is the latest bipartisan effort to address concerns around AI models, Congress has ultimately failed to advance broad legislation.

Zuckerberg urged the federal government to work with companies to test new models as he laid out his strategies for protecting against cybersecurity and bioterrorism.

“First, we should focus on limiting the physical production and distribution of harmful materials,” he wrote. “I expect it will be easier to regulate and control physical components than the spread of knowledge, so this is an important area of policy focus. Second, we should accelerate society’s ability to develop new cures and inoculate against new issues as they arise. This includes streamlining how the FDA and other regulators test and approve new treatments.”

Zuckerberg also defended the spread of data centers, arguing that the centers represent investment into communities as he touted his company’s goal of being “water-positive, meaning that we’ll restore more water than we use in the watersheds where we operate by 2030.”

PARIS — Former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is the latest in a string of French presidential candidates allegedly targeted by a Russian disinformation campaign.

Attal, the candidate of President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, said on Thursday he had been “a victim” of an electoral “interference” attempt originating from Russia, and that he expected such “destabilization efforts” to increase ahead of France’s April 2027 election.

Viginum, the country’s agency for fighting online disinformation, confirmed it had detected the operation against Attal and attributed it “with a high level of confidence” to “pro-Russian” disinformation tactics.

Former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, who is also running for president, was the first to be reportedly targeted last week, before center-left parliamentarian Raphaël Glucksmann, who is expected to run, shared that he had been targeted by a “Russian operation” on Monday.

Attal said on RTL radio on Thursday the smear campaign against him consisted of falsified news reports about his health and policy proposals, which copied the branding of French news outlets. “Russia wants to steal the election from the French,” he said.

A 2024 report from Viginum identified a similar “pro-Russian campaign” known as “Matriochka,” which involved news and media reports impersonating well-known French outlets.

“Combating foreign interference and protecting our democratic framework are a priority,” current Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu posted online on Wednesday. “Several instances of foreign interference targeting candidates have already been detected, and in each case, the individuals were immediately notified.”

LAS VEGAS — Weeks before they escaped a closed test and launched a cyberattack without any human prompting, some of OpenAI’s most advanced artificial intelligence agents secretly began sharing tips on how to cheat their way through an internal hacking evaluation, two of the AI company’s researchers said Wednesday.

“This is a pivotal moment both for our company as well as the AI industry as a whole,” Michael Dalton, one of the AI-maker’s researchers, said during a presentation at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The latest disclosure provides greater detail on the timeline and methods used by two of OpenAI’s models before they slipped outside a controlled environment and onto the open internet, allowing the models to breach AI developer platform Hugging Face undetected. OpenAI admitted its models were responsible for the hack late last month, roughly a week after Hugging Face said an autonomous AI system broke into its network.

The revelation is likely to spur fresh scrutiny of the measures leading AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic are taking to monitor the behavior of their most cyber-capable technology — especially during evaluations where agents are prompted to demonstrate their hacking skills in what is meant to be a controlled setting.

On Tuesday, the U.K.’s AI Safety and Security Institute disclosed that Anthropic’s most powerful AI model created fake online personas and sought to trick a human coder into abetting a cyberattack during a recent hacking test gone wrong. After the Hugging Face disclosure last month, Anthropic conducted a review and found models it was testing had breached three organizations in separate incidents dating back to April.

Dalton and Eric Wallace, another OpenAI researcher, said Wednesday the AI giant recently learned that multiple agents it was testing simultaneously began communicating over an internal message board in early May. There, different models shared advice about how to accomplish difficult hacking challenges they were struggling to surmount, including workarounds that required internet access.

Two OpenAI models ultimately strung together a series of sophisticated techniques to gain access to the internet and worm their way inside Hugging Face in mid-July. OpenAI has said the models were focused on completing a hacking evaluation they were prompted to solve, and that correct answers could be found on the AI developer platform.

The OpenAI researchers told conference attendees that since early May, the models created a message board inside OpenAI’s Artifactory internal file system. Without the company’s knowledge, the models spent months independently exchanging information and techniques to help each other complete difficult tasks.

Wallace said that when models get stuck, they often “try to game or cheat the task in order to get their reward.”

“The beginning of this incident kind of traces back to this point where one agent realized it could communicate by uploading a note,” he added.

By late May, one model found a way to abuse Artifactory’s internet access to retrieve files from various websites — effectively giving the models indirect access to the internet. In June, the models were able to find and exploit a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability to gain administrative privileges on Artifactory, install remote software and expand their activity within the system.

These efforts eventually overloaded Artifactory, causing a system-wide outage in early July that alerted OpenAI’s engineers to the ploy. After investigating, the company revoked the model’s credentials, removed the message board and worked with Artifactory to fix any gaps before resuming training. But the models found another way to communicate inside Artifactory just days later and continued exchanging techniques to target additional vulnerabilities within OpenAI’s infrastructure and external systems, including Hugging Face.

In light of the incident, Dalton said OpenAI is “consciously slowing down research to enhance security and to upgrade the security principles and foundation of our environment, and dramatically scaling up the monitoring of our AI agents and improving our general security control environment across prevention, detection, and mitigation.”

Leading artificial intelligence models from Anthropic and OpenAI created fake online personas and tried to deceive human coders into abetting a cyberattack during a recent safety evaluation, the U.K.’s AI Safety and Security Institute disclosed Tuesday.

It marks the latest case in which a powerful AI system has attempted a digital attack on an unwitting third party without direct prompting during such an evaluation — heightening concerns the powerful technology is advancing too fast for responsible oversight.

The disclosure is likely to ignite fresh calls in Washington and Silicon Valley for more rigorous regulation of the AI industry, particularly over frontier models with advanced capabilities to detect and launch cyberattacks. It comes just days after similar testing mishaps involving some of the same models from OpenAI and Anthropic sparked urgent calls for new AI safety regulation and a push within Silicon Valley to slow the rapid pace of AI development.

Like its U.S. counterpart, AISI routinely conducts security evaluations to better understand what dangers both new and soon-to-be-released AI models pose to public health and safety. But even the digital security body said the actions it uncovered by Anthropic’s Claude Mythos 5 and ChatGPT 5.6 — the latest publicly released model from either AI lab — were unlike anything it had seen before.

“This is the first time AISI has seen deception of this severity that was targeted at a real person, unprompted, in the real world,” AISI said in a 35-page technical report accompanying a blog post Tuesday.

AISI said the malicious activity began on July 25. The AI safety evaluator detected it and launched an investigation on July 28, when it spotted “unusual data transfers” stemming from a cyber evaluation it was conducting on Mythos 5 and ChatGPT 5.6.

Overall, AISI determined that Mythos 5 and ChatGPT 5.6 took “autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet, targeting real people and organizations” during 10 of the 122 evaluations the research body conducted and isolated for review. The majority of those actions, it said, involved Mythos 5 and arose during a “single, sustained line of activity.”

In the most alarming incident it uncovered, Mythos 5 attempted a supply chain attack — a sophisticated technique often deployed by North Korean and Russian cyber operatives, in which hackers bury malware inside legitimate code.

To do so, Anthropic’s model created “multiple fake identities” on developer platform GitHub and used them to send messages “pressuring” an open-source software engineer to unwittingly introduce a bugged update into code widely available on the popular site, AISI said. When that effort failed, the AI “edited its earlier activity to appear harmless” and “considered adopting a fresh identity to continue,” AISI added, a sign the model was intent on repeating the ruse.

As part of the same effort, Mythos 5 also sent direct messages over GitHub to software engineers that contained malware.

In another sign of deceitful behavior AISI uncovered in its investigation, multiple AI agents it was testing appeared to communicate with one another about how to convince real engineers using GitHub to trust them. “One agent left public messages on GitHub offering collaboration with other agents working on the same challenge,” AISI wrote.

AISI’s blog and technical assessment make no mention of whether the models also attempted to exploit previously unknown software bugs — called zero-days — during the evaluation.

Last month, OpenAI disclosed that GPT 5.6 and another of its models escaped onto the open internet during what was supposed to be a controlled test, and then hacked another company in a first-of-its-kind, autonomous breach.

In response, Anthropic launched an investigation into whether any of its models took illicit action during recent testing and discovered Mythos 5 and two other models had hacked three organizations during tests dating back to April.

In a statement, an Anthropic spokesperson said they are “grateful” to AISI for their leadership and that this review underscores the need for “a broader conversation about how to safely evaluate increasingly capable AI agents.”

The spokesperson added: “As we shared after disclosing our own incident last week, the field needs stronger, shared standards for how evaluation environments are built and secured. We look forward to partnering with the UK AISI to learn more about this incident as we conduct our own investigation.”

An OpenAI spokesperson referred POLITICO to a blog post about the incident that went up Tuesday evening. “We are committed to working across the industry to strengthen shared practices for conducting high-risk evaluations safely, including convening stakeholders such as national AI institutes, independent evaluators, other AI labs, and other groups in the coming weeks,” the blog read.

AISI stressed in its blog that the malicious activity it disclosed Tuesday took place under “deliberately permissive conditions” so they could assess the safety risks posed by the two models. This included granting the models access to the internet, unlike the earlier incidents detailed by Anthropic and OpenAI.

AISI also noted the models were intentionally stripped of internal guardrails that block malicious behavior. AISI was only able to disable those controls because of its role testing Mythos 5 and ChatGPT 5.6.

Still, AISI said the incidents highlighted the need for greater monitoring of model behavior during testing, and tighter controls over their access to the internet.

The Trump administration is finalizing a voluntary framework under which AI labs would submit powerful models they want to release to the public for federal safety testing. But it has not yet made the framework public, and it includes no provisions for models AI labs are developing internally.

The incidents last month from OpenAI and Anthropic both involved models not intended for public release.

Some cyber experts say recent incidents highlight deeper questions around AI development, such as who is liable when AI systems break federal hacking laws.

“If any of these were human-originated, they would lead to clear and vigorous prosecution. I think it’s time for a serious discussion about updates to existing computer security law,” said Marc Rogers, a hacker and prominent cybersecurity expert.

Palantir is shifting profits from its European operations to the United States, allowing the Florida-based data analytics giant to pay minimal taxes in Europe, a new report finds.

The report by the U.K.-based Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research, a group partly funded by labor unions that researches corporate tax avoidance in an effort to win reform of global tax rules, found that Palantir’s European subsidiaries, which took in €440.5 million in annual revenue in 2024, report far smaller profit margins in Europe than in the U.S.

“Although a substantial part of Palantir’s revenue is realized in Europe, almost all of the pre-tax profits are funneled to the United States,” the report said.

Palantir pays no U.S. federal income tax because previous losses, tax credits, and R&D deductions offset its taxable income; and virtually no state income tax, with the exception of Maryland, which levies a digital services tax.

The profit gap between the U.S. and Europe is stark. In 2025, Palantir’s American business pocketed 47.7 cents in profit from every dollar of revenue — more than double the previous year’s 22.5 cents. Outside the U.S., the profit margin was just 6.3 percent. In some European subsidiaries, it fell to around 3 percent, according to the new report.

CICTAR argues that Palantir “intentionally and artificially” shrinks European profits — and therefore its European tax bills — to concentrate profits in the U.S. There is no claim in the report that such arrangements, often referred to as “profit shifting,” are illegal. Multinational companies often reduce reported profits by paying subsidiaries or other related entities for intellectual property, loans or expertise.

In Sweden, for example, Palantir reported €13.7 million in revenue in 2024, but only €1.1 million in profit. At Sweden’s 20 percent corporate tax rate, that left the company with a tax bill of just €424,000.

In its Q2 earnings report on Monday, Palantir made no explicit reference to earnings from its European subsidiaries. Instead, it highlighted its U.S. business, where revenue rose 115 percent year-on-year to $1.57 billion (€1.36 billion), and boasted of its 62 percent profit margin.

A U.K.-based Palantir spokesperson said that the majority of the company’s 2025 revenue and profitability was driven by its U.S. business. “Our tax position in each jurisdiction reflects the level of economic activity there, and we meet our tax obligations in every market in which we operate,” the spokesperson said.

Not alone

Palantir is not the first U.S. tech company to draw scrutiny over how it books profits in Europe.

In 2024, the European Court of Justice ordered Apple to pay Ireland €13 bn in back taxes, ending an 8-year-long fight over what Brussels said amounted to illegal state aid. Amazon also fought the European Commission over claims it had received an unlawful tax advantage worth around €250 million in Luxembourg — a case the company ultimately won. Microsoft, meanwhile, has faced scrutiny over its Irish subsidiary, Microsoft Round Island One, which avoided paying millions to the state after claiming tax residency in Bermuda. The U.S. software giant has denied that it is circumventing Ireland’s tax laws.

Jan Willem Goudriaan, General Secretary of the European Federation of Public Service Unions — a supporter of CICTAR— said that companies such as Palantir, Amazon and Microsoft focus on minimizing the taxes they pay, “thus robbing funding for public services.”

“Companies bidding for public contracts should have to demonstrate responsible tax conduct by disclosing where their revenues, workforce, profits and taxes are located,” he said.

Another reason for the low profits of Palantir’s European subsidiaries is their high personnel costs. In the U.K., where most of the company’s non-U.S. workforce is based, Palantir reported £173 million (€204.3 million) in employee costs for 749 staff in 2024 — an average of £230,974 (€272,803) per employee.

The report also points to Palantir’s use of stock-based compensation across its European subsidiaries, especially in the U.K., Spain and Norway. This means employees are paid partly in company shares or awards. Those awards are recorded as staff expenses, which can lower a subsidiary’s corporate tax bill.

PARIS — A group affiliated with Russia’s intelligence agency launched a disinformation campaign against center-left MEP and likely presidential candidate in next year’s French election, Raphaël Glucksmann, he claimed in a post on X on Tuesday.

Glucksmann, who is expected to announce whether he will run for president in the coming weeks, said he had been informed by the French Secretariat-General for National Defence and Security of a “Russian operation” that was “directly controlled by the [Russian] GRU.”

Former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, who is a confirmed presidential candidate, was also reportedly targeted by a Russian disinformation campaign last week. And several local candidates from the left-wing France Unbowed movement, known for its pro-Palestinian advocacy, were allegedly targeted by an Israeli firm earlier this year.

The alleged disinformation effort against Glucksmann involved an article posted on a website mimicking well-known left-wing news outlet Blast, as well as a social media clip claiming Glucksmann’s partner Léa Salamé — the host of French public television’s prime-time news program — had tried bribing other journalists to speak about his likely candidacy favorably.

Glucksmann is a prominent critic of the Russian government and took part in the 2013 Maidan uprising in Kyiv.

“Russian agencies have begun operations to destabilize the 2027 presidential election,” he wrote on social media. “This attack is merely a foretaste of what is to come.”

The Russian Embassy in Paris did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As he nears the end of his term, French President Emmanuel Macron has said that safeguarding the 2027 presidential election from foreign interference would be a top priority.

BRUSSELS — When French and German security chiefs announced plans last month to develop a “European sovereign digital backbone,” tech and defense industry insiders on both sides of the Atlantic knew what they really meant: Adieu Palantir.  

Across Europe, the hunt is on for alternatives to the U.S.-based data analytics company that a growing number of government officials believe is too deeply lodged in some of the most sensitive areas of government, from local policing and global intelligence to national defense and health systems. 

Yet it is precisely Palantir’s crucial functions in daily workflows, and its largely unmatched data expertise, that will make it extremely hard for Europe to cut it off in pursuit of greater digital sovereignty. 

“Let’s be honest, Palantir’s product is very good and addictive, it’s pretty much like the sugar in Coca-Cola,” said French digital sovereignty advocate, Philippe Latombe. “Palantir can treat massive amounts of data with great precision and with their experience, they had time to improve their algorithms with many clients and adapt them to many use cases.” 

Still, the drive to break free from Palantir is sweeping across the continent, from Madrid, where the government of Pedro Sánchez has instructed state-backed companies to block Palantir from future public procurement contracts, to France’s domestic intelligence services (DGSI) selecting French company ChapsVision over Palantir. In Britain, the next test may come in February 2027, when the new Labour government of Andy Burnham will face a choice of whether to cut off Palantir’s £330 million National Health Service Federated Data Platform contract. 

Last month’s decision by the French and German intelligence agencies to choose ChapsVision was a double-blow for Palantir’s leadership. CEO Alex Karp showed little patience for the sudden turn away from his company’s wares, declaring that he wasn’t worried about European competitors. “We have a model of what doesn’t work,” he quipped last week on Fox Business. “It’s called Europe.” 

Olivier Dellenbach, ChapsVision’s chief executive, told POLITICO that his company has benefited from what he calls a “visceral rejection of Palantir” in Europe.  

But he also cautioned that he did not want ChapsVision reduced to an anti-Palantir way out. Digital sovereignty, he argues, will remain an empty phrase unless governments turn it into industrial policy. “We need more public procurement,” Dellenbach said. 

Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Romania, the Netherlands and Canada have already shown interest in the French Army’s Artemis AI, according to Patrick Moreau, one of the architects of the solution built by French aerospace and defense company Thales. 

“They all want to be able to choose a sovereign solution that is compatible with NATO standards,” he said. “Unlike Palantir’s black box.” 

But for now, even officials who want sovereign alternatives acknowledge that Europe’s replacement market remains fragmented and European companies are yet to match Palantir’s scale and track record.

Admiral Pierre Vandier, NATO’s supreme allied commander transformation, recently told POLITICO the alliance has no viable alternative to Palantir’s battlefield AI technology.  

Another NATO official, granted anonymity to speak frankly, said that Palantir’s system has an unmatched capacity to sift through mountains of satellite imagery to help identify a target, advise on the weapon to strike it, inform how much ammunition is required — and automatically put in an order to replenish the stock. 

“As far as I know, today there is no real competitor for Palantir,” Vandier said in May. 

Freedom or democracy? 

Co-founded by Karp and billionaire investor Peter Thiel, Palantir built its reputation inside the U.S. national security apparatus. Today, the company has a market capitalization of $330 billion.

Thiel has been one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump, while the company’s work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Israeli military has come in for criticism from Amnesty International and others for alleged human rights violations. Adding to unease about Palantir’s ideology-driven business were recent revelations of Thiel’s secretive Dialog society, an invitation-only ideas club for the global elite, and Karp’s manifesto arguing that Palantir is the democratic West’s best hope to stay ahead of authoritarian rivals.

“Peter Thiel explains that the defense of freedom does not necessarily require democracy,” French member of Parliament Aurélien Saintoul, who wrote a report on foreign military dependencies, told POLITICO. “He is clearly putting technical means to serve his political project, and we are talking about technofascists here.” 

A Palantir spokesperson who declined to be named dismissed such accusations as “ludicrous,” noting that similar characterizations about the company have been made recently by the Russian foreign ministry.

“We know what side we’re on, and who we’re standing with,” the spokesman said, citing ongoing work to support the Ukrainian military. “Since our inception, protecting privacy and civil liberties has served as the foundation for how we conduct our work across both public and private sector institutions. Western politicians should think hard about who the real enemy is and not allow themselves to be ventriloquized by the Kremlin.”

Many of the company’s European critics maintain that the Palantir question is much more about tech sovereignty than political ideology. Extracting the company from some of the most delicate corners of European security structures would offer a blueprint for claiming more technological independence.

Instead, if governments in Europe cannot wean themselves off a company that provides software solutions, it would reveal how unrealistic hopes are to reduce dependence on U.S. technology giants that provide cloud infrastructure and hardware.

There is also the uncomfortable reality that at the same time that political leaders are calling for a break from Palantir, Europe’s biggest banks and asset managers have dramatically increased their investments in the U.S. company over the past year as it positions itself to profit from the AI gold rush, reports investigative outlet Follow the Money.

From crisis tool to critical infrastructure

Palantir’s European foothold was built long before the current boom in AI. A hallmark of its growth was that it never wasted a crisis to demonstrate its value for governments in need.  

In France, for instance, Palantir arrived in the aftermath of the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks as security services scrambled to respond to a fervent public backlash on how they could have allowed such a tragedy to happen. The domestic intelligence agency signed a contract with the data analytics giant in 2016. 

A similar pattern played out in Germany, where Palantir’s first major deployment came in Frankfurt, in the central state of Hesse, where police purchased Palantir’s Gotham in 2017 and deployed it under the name hessenDATA. It proved to be a crucial tool for officers to turn sprawling information into leads to help solve crimes.

Germany remains deeply divided over whether to use Palantir’s software. At the national level, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has pushed to expand the use of Palantir and introduced legislation that could pave the way for broader federal use. But the move has run into opposition from coalition partners the Social Democrats, as well as senior security officials.

The same crisis-to-contract pattern appeared in the U.K. during the Covid-19 pandemic. Palantir’s relationship with the National Health Service (NHS) began when it was paid a nominal £1 fee to help aggregate data during the crisis, according to Palantir’s U.K. lead Louis Mosley. 

Europol, the EU’s police agency, used Palantir’s Gotham platform from 2016 to 2021 before ultimately dropping it. For one Europol official who was granted anonymity to discuss the matter freely, the problem with Palantir is less ideological than practical. Yes, the platform is expensive, raises sovereignty concerns and leaves clients dependent on Palantir for updates, the official said. But the more basic question is whether every agency needs the full Palantir machine. 

“[Palantir] is really good when you have massive amounts of data and want to connect everything,” they said. “But that is not the case for us. In many cases, the alternatives are close enough. If we used it, I’m not sure our efficiency would increase dramatically.” 

Part of Palantir’s approach in Europe is to hire former officials from the institutions it wants as customers. OpenDemocracy reported that Palantir hired four former officials from the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence before winning a £240 million MoD contract.

The influence drive 

Moreover, Palantir is now seeking new business on the continent in defense.

On Jul. 1, Palantir’s Maven Smart System — which was first used by the Pentagon — became fully operational at NATO, meaning it’s been given security clearance to operate on the classified network. According to a NATO statement, the platform links command-and-control systems across the Alliance. 

“I think this is a very important milestone for European defense,” said Palantir’s U.K. chief Louis Mosley. 

But Palantir’s grip on Europe does not stop at the doors of government or army barracks. It also runs through some of the continent’s industrial crown jewels. Airbus signed with Palantir in 2015, making Palantir’s Foundry the backbone of its aviation data platform. Automaker BMW, energy company British Petroleum and media publisher Axel Springer — POLITICO’s parent company — all use Foundry to improve their business productivity as well. 

Looking for alternatives 

Even if Europe manages to loosen Palantir’s grip, the company’s model built on top of the latest AI large-language systems appears to only be getting stronger. On Jun. 30, Amazon Web Services said it would invest $1 billion in a new “Forward Deployed Engineering” organization, embedding teams of engineers inside customer headquarters to build AI systems alongside them.  

Days later, Microsoft announced a $2.5 billion push to send 6,000 engineers and industry specialists into client organizations. Both initiatives echo Palantir’s pioneering model to not simply sell software but put engineers inside a buyer’s operation. 

Both the strength of its products and the sensitive areas where they’re applied, make Palantir Europe’s sovereign test case par excellence. If governments and companies can replace a software layer that helps turn data into decisions, they may have a blueprint for clawing back some digital sovereignty. If they cannot, the next generation of AI tools from U.S. tech giants may prove even harder to quit. 

“Europe’s public institutions cannot become dependent on software built by a small circle of U.S. tech billionaires with an obscure political worldview,” said German Green MEP Hannah Neumann, who sits on Parliament’s defense committee. “It would be like outsourcing part of the democratic state to a private intelligence service that answers neither to voters nor to parliament.”

David Pargamin contributed reporting from Paris.

The White House has a framework for how to review advanced AI models, according to an administration official, but did not detail it or say whether it would be released to the public.

AI companies are expected to review a draft Tuesday at a meeting with the Office of the National Cyber Director, according to four people familiar with the planning who were granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The framework will shape how the federal government works with the country’s leading AI developers before and after their most advanced models are deployed, and comes as the Trump administration seeks to address potential safety and national security risks while pursuing a mostly light-touch regulatory approach to the technology.

“The voluntary framework outlined in the June 2nd executive order was complete by the deadline,” said a White House official, granted anonymity to discuss internal policy deliberations. “Discussions with industry about next steps are underway.”

The framework has not been released to industry, which was working closely with the White House on its contours over the last few weeks, and it’s unclear if it will be publicly released. The order does not stipulate one way or the other, though the voluntary nature of the order raises questions about how companies that aren’t briefed by the White House on the framework will be able to opt in, should it not be released more widely. The deadline for the framework was Aug. 1, 60 days after the executive order was signed, according to the order.

Meta, Anthropic and Google will be among the companies in attendance at the ONCD meeting, three of the people said.

Google, OpenAI and Anthropic jointly reviewed a draft and submitted edits in late July, as POLITICO previously reported.

The four companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.