Berlin's Ecosia is replacing French AI provider Mistral with affordable, energy-efficient open models, some of them from China, reached through Germany's Melious.ai on European infrastructure. Its founder questions how European Mistral is with US investors behind it. Europe's cyber agency ENISA and the Joint Research Centre, meanwhile, are testing Chinese open-weight models themselves.
Austria wants AI systems to issue legally binding government decisions without human oversight, from social assistance to business licensing. Privacy advocates warn of decisions resting on hallucinations. Meanwhile the EU's proposed Cloud and AI Development Act pushes administrations to adopt more AI, and EDRi calls it deregulation repackaged as an industrial win.
The European Commission plans to bring AWS and Azure under the Digital Markets Act, while a European satellite-data cloud and a Dutch open source agreement show what alternatives can look like. Data protection gained both stricter enforcement guidance and an economic argument, consumer authorities turned to in-game currencies and scams, and Europe's innovation strength still outruns its venture capital.