💻🌐BRUSSELS IS LOSING THE AI RACE FROM THE INSIDE OUT

Axel Voss, German CDU member of the European Parliament and a card-carrying EPP ally of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, is publicly torching the Commission’s handling of artificial intelligence.

“The whole working method of the European Commission is not adapted to these extremely fast-changing developments,” Voss told Politico, adding that AI Act enforcement “is not on the level where we would like to have it.”

Von der Leyen’s State of the Union address last week didn’t help calm critics either. Voss called it “not ambitious enough regarding digital developments.” The EU’s much-celebrated AI Act is barely off the ground, and its own architects are already admitting it isn’t working.

While the Trump administration moves to unleash American AI innovation, Brussels is still struggling to enforce rules it passed two years ago. The Commission built the regulatory empire. Now even its own allies are watching it crumble.

2. 📱DELETE EVERYTHING: VDL’S DISAPPEARING ACT

The EU’s own watchdog is sounding the alarm on transparency, and the irony is hard to miss. European Ombudsman Teresa Anjinho warned this week that deleted texts, ephemeral chats, and AI-driven decision-making are creating “accountability-free zones“ inside EU institutions, making it nearly impossible for citizens to scrutinize how Brussels actually operates.

The rules governing public access to EU documents are 25 years old, built for a world of paper trails and physical archives. Anjinho says they’re no match for a governance structure that increasingly runs on disappearing messages and data flows that leave no record behind.

Despite the Ombudsman ruling that deleting President von der Leyen’s texts amounts to maladministration, Brussels confirmed it will keep doing exactly that, citing cybersecurity concerns. Anjinho pushed back, stating that “an institution cannot let a security architecture quietly decide what is a document in the first place.”

The bottom line, per Anjinho, is that European citizens shouldn’t need to file complaints or go to court to see how their government works. The current system “desperately lacks clarity,” and the longer Brussels stalls, the higher “the steadily rising price we pay for inertia.”

💸 FRANCE SHAKES DOWN AMERICAN TECH COMPANIES TO FUND EUROPE’S €2 TRILLION BUDGET

French Europe Minister Benjamin Haddad made waves on Tuesday during a live interview when he walked through exactly what Brussels intends to do with the tens of billions it has collected from American companies. The $5.2 billion fine the EU extracted from Google, Haddad told France Info, is “a new revenue stream for the European Union” that “should automatically lower the contributions of all member states.” The minister also characterized the windfall as “good news” that will help “keep member states’ contributions under control” as Brussels works to agree on a new €2 trillion, seven-year spending plan.

Haddad’s comments, while running directly counter to the stated aim of European regulations like the DMA of fostering fair competition across digital markets, illustrate how the Commission has used the regulation since it entered into force in 2023: to extract as much wealth as possible from American innovators operating in Europe.

Since 2024, the European Commission has handed down more than $7 billion in penalties to American companies under its digital regulatory framework. Factoring in the roughly $1 billion per year in compliance costs absorbed by US firms, the total costs surpass $9 billion. For context, that figure exceeds what Europe collects in taxes from its own tech sector.

President Trump has repeatedly held that the “United States of America is not a ‘PIGGYBANK’ for Europe,” and has backed up his statements with tariff threats and a Section 301 investigation. Yet, as Haddad’s comments demonstrate, Europe has no intention of treating American companies fairly or softening their extractive regulations.

Europe should understand by now that brazen theft from US companies whose services hundreds of millions of Europeans enjoy on a daily basis will not be tolerated.