Digital sovereignty In 2023, Cédric O bought into Mistral AI for €176, then lobbied for a lighter AI Act; after the latest funding round, his stake is worth around €90 million on paper. Since then, the French state has become the startup’s first customer, from the armed forces to the civil service. This summer, Mistral crossed a threshold: its infrastructure now hosts third-party models, starting with China’s GLM-5.2. The pivot to a platform model is rational, and I defended it myself. What isn’t rational is to keep selling it as technological sovereignty.
Digital sovereignty Anthropic filed its confidential S-1 on June 1, is targeting a Nasdaq listing in October at around $2 trillion, and on September 12 its CEO published a plan to slow the AI race. Michael Burry called it pre-IPO hype; he is wrong on the technology, but his calendar is worth a look. Run against the only documented cause we have, the METR report, the three measures meant to protect us would not have prevented a single day of the July incident: internal model, in-house infrastructure, shared cache, unsolvable tasks. They act somewhere else, on price: chip controls, a distillation crackdown, and a compute cap decide who may train, who may learn, and who may cross the next threshold, in a market where the gap between a proprietary model and the open-weight swarm runs fifty to one. And on that terrain, Brussels has already written half the text.
Artificial Intelligence METR’s report on the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident runs to ninety-one pages, and what has been made of it misses the point entirely. Twelve hundred agents meant to be isolated found one another, organized, and spent four days working around a transcript scorer that did not exist: they would have earned full marks by simply handing in their work. Between thirty and forty percent of the benchmark’s tasks were unsolvable, and the question of whether the evaluation apparatus had caused the behavior it was measuring was added to the investigation’s mandate at OpenAI’s request. Heavier still, and picked up nowhere: for want of human hours, METR delegated the analysis to agents of the very model that took part in the incident, on credits from the company under investigation, while writing that it could not rule out their having lied. What that changes for the independent evaluators Amodei wants, and for the AI Act’s scientific panel, is not a question of badges but of the capacity to read.
Europe Dario Amodei’s essay never mentions Europe, and yet the AI Act already contains, on paper, the first step of his plan: evaluations, cybersecurity, incident reporting, a panel of independent experts, and since August 2, 2026 an AI Office with the power to investigate and to fine. The difference comes down to one thing: the regulation organizes disclosure under secrecy, where Amodei proposes permanent presence and publication. Brussels selects by a compute threshold what it has never observed, and its Article 78 is why the public learned of the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident from an American nonprofit and a competitor’s blog. The embryo of that college of evaluators already exists, in Article 68, and three things are missing from it that an implementing act and one amendment would suffice to supply.
Digital sovereignty Dario Amodei proposes to slow the race for AI capabilities: third-party evaluators stationed inside the labs, coordination among companies in “democratic countries” under an antitrust waiver, negotiation with China. The word Europe never appears in the essay. Behind the vocabulary of caution, the three concrete measures, a chip embargo, a crackdown on distillation, and the securing of model weights, describe a regime in which frontier capability becomes a commodity rationed by Washington. There is still one idea worth taking whole, the embedded evaluators, and one question to ask before applauding it: who has their foot on the pedal.
Digital euro The ECB promises an offline digital euro “just like cash”: no network, anonymous, resilient. But this digital cash can only exist inside a tamper-proof chip in your phone, one whose access is controlled by Apple, Samsung, and Google and which Article 33 of the regulation must legally compel them to open. A capped wallet, an applet updated remotely, anonymity bounded by AML checks at loading and unloading: you no longer own your money, you rent space on a chip. The banknote never had to ask permission to circulate. That difference has a name: the freedom to pay without asking.
Society Hundreds of consumers are telling the same story on social media: “CBD” bought in a legal shop, then hallucinations, tachycardia, sometimes the emergency room. French customs have documented the reason: hemp flowers sprayed with synthetic cannabinoids like EDMB-4en-PINACA, a hundred times more potent than CBD and invisible to standard drug screens. Contrary to the conspiratorial reading, the state never wanted these shops: it tried to ban them and lost twice in court. But it has since built no oversight, no traceability, and no testing requirement, because this gray market suits every level of society. An investigation into France’s third drug, the one nobody will claim.
My life 
After the U4 blast furnace at Uckange, one hour of driving to the northeast takes you from industrial wasteland to forest canopy. At Orscholz, the Saarschleife treetop walk unrolls 1,250 meters of timber walkway through beech, oak, and Douglas fir, up to a 42-meter tower overlooking the most spectacular river bend in Germany. Not a single step from the parking lot to the top, a maximum grade of 6 percent, and a privately run structure maintained without a euro from local taxpayers. A visit, a note on the photography, Siegfried Line remnants a few hundred meters away, and everything you need to plan your own trip.
Digital sovereignty On July 28, 2026, China began volume production of its own immersion scanners, the 60-million-euro machines that print circuits onto silicon and that only ASML truly knows how to build: five units this year, about twenty in 2027, against ASML’s 130 systems a year. One to twenty-five: the ratio looks trivial, yet Seoul dropped 10% and Tokyo 4% in the days that followed, because a technology embargo has no proportional value. Its value is binary, and it has just stopped being a wall and become a delay, something that can be calculated, amortized, and planned around. By removing the alternative, export controls created the competitor they were meant to smother, exactly as they had taught Chinese AI frugality. Three days later, Bpifrance sold 2.5% of Orange for 1.1 billion euros and called it asset rotation: for the same sum, one bought productive capital, the other three months of cash.
Surveillance and civil liberties On July 8, 2026, the French Senate published Report No. 875 on the regulation of information in the digital space: fifty-six recommendations, the very first of which proposes to “render invisible” certain users as elections approach. Behind a largely accurate economic diagnosis unfolds a complete apparatus: a disinformation observatory, a legal definition of truth, offenses without intent, ethics-based accreditation, and media promoted by algorithms configured on government instruction. No one will be forbidden to speak; some will simply be unfindable, unfunded, unrecognized. Having outsourced its censorship to Brussels, France is now bringing the political administration of visibility in-house. A recommendation-by-recommendation analysis, written by one of the parties concerned.