France's domestic intelligence service DGSI will replace data tools from Palantir Technologies with a local alternative made by French firm Chapsvision, the French prime minister's office said Tuesday, Reuters reported. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said Chapsvision had "been retained by the DGSI ... to substitute the American giant Palantir," though the changeover is likely to take several years. After Palantir said its DGSI contract, renewed in late 2025, "remains fully in force," Lecornu's office clarified that Palantir's tools would stay in use until Chapsvision's could be integrated to avoid a capability gap. The shift is part of a broader European push to reduce reliance on U.S. technology firms: Germany's military has dropped Palantir, and Britain is reviewing the National Health Service's £330 million data contract with the company. Lecornu also said France would invest €655 million in AI and build a shared chatbot for all state services.
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UK ministers have spent weeks lobbying senior Trump officials and the president directly to reassure them that the under-16 social media ban announced Monday is not aimed at U.S. technology companies, The Guardian reported. Officials described a three-part approach: engaging the companies, briefing the administration in advance and mythbusting in the media. Prime Minister Keir Starmer spoke to Trump on Saturday and was due to meet him at the G7 in Évian-les-Bains this week. Elon Musk called the ban "a wolf in sheep's clothing" in a post on X Monday; Trump himself had not commented by Monday evening.
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President Donald Trump threatened a 100% tariff on French wine and champagne unless Paris removes its digital services tax on technology firms, the South China Morning Post reported, citing the New York Post. France's 2019 digital services tax imposes a 3% levy on revenues earned in France by technology companies, including Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google parent Alphabet. Trump warned that without the tax repeal, "I have no choice but to charge a 100 per cent tariff on all champagnes and all wines coming out of France." The U.S. accounted for 21% of France's wine and spirits export market last year.
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Upstage CEO Kim Sung-hoon said Washington's move to cut foreign access to top U.S.-made AI models shows the risk of depending on others and urged Seoul to raise its sovereign AI support more than tenfold, the Korea Herald reported. The Korea Internet & Security Agency, SK Telecom, and Samsung Electronics had gained access to Anthropic's Mythos model through Project Glasswing earlier this month, only for the U.S. export directive to block it, the Korea Times reported. A Ministry of Science and ICT official said the government is weighing its response under the coordination of the Office of National Security.
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Liberal MP Andrew Hastie, the Australian shadow minister for industry and sovereign capability, said Australia should sharply scale up AI investment to avoid becoming dependent on the U.S. for sovereign capability, The Guardian reported. He delivered the annual Tom Hughes Oration in Sydney Monday night. Hastie likened AI development to the nuclear arms race of the cold war era, proposed Australia position itself as a southern hemisphere technology hub and called for a new AI ambassador and an education overhaul. He warned that a U.S.-China hot war over AI dominance and chip production in Taiwan would be worse than a hot war in the Middle East and that Australia would not be able to escape it.
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