Artificial intelligence

Digital citizenship education key focus at Council of Europe policy forum

The second European Forum on digital citizenship education has concluded in Strasbourg, bringing together policymakers, educators, civil society groups, youth organisations, and parents to discuss responsible participation in digital societies.

Participants examined practical approaches to digital citizenship education, with discussions focusing on AI in education, children’s rights online, critical thinking, inclusion, and safe participation in digital spaces. Particular attention was given to the role of parents and families in helping young people develop responsible and informed online behaviours.

The forum also contributed to preparations for the Council of Europe’s Road Map for strengthening digital citizenship education for 2027–2031. Stakeholders highlighted the need for closer cooperation between public authorities, the private sector, and civil society to support effective implementation.

Outcomes from the event will inform ongoing Council of Europe work to promote democratic values, human rights, and active participation in the digital era, while helping learners and education professionals respond to the growing influence of technology on society.

Why does it matter?

Digital citizenship education is becoming a strategic policy issue as societies try to ensure that technological change is matched by the skills needed for safe, informed, and responsible participation online. The Council of Europe forum links digital literacy with democratic participation, children’s rights, critical thinking, inclusion, and human rights-based digital transformation.

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China showcases AI innovation and global cooperation at World Intelligence Expo 2026

The 2026 World Intelligence Expo has opened in Tianjin, bringing together more than 700 exhibitors to present AI technologies, products, and application scenarios.

The four-day event is co-hosted by the municipal governments of Tianjin and Chongqing under the theme ‘Intelligence: Extensive Development Space, Sustainable Growth Driver’. It features seven exhibition zones covering embodied AI, core AI technologies, the low-altitude economy, commercial space exploration, and other emerging technology areas.

Chinese officials used the event to emphasise the integration of AI into manufacturing, industrial operations, and the broader digital economy. Ke Jixin, Vice Minister of Industry and Information Technology, said the ministry would advance the ‘AI+ manufacturing’ initiative, strengthen innovation capabilities, and improve the industrial environment for AI development.

A major focus of the expo is developing high-quality datasets to support intelligent manufacturing. Liu Liehong, head of the National Data Administration, said China would support industry leaders and pilot entities in building sector-specific datasets in areas including automobile manufacturing, shipbuilding, rail transit, non-ferrous metals, and petrochemicals.

The event also highlighted China’s interest in expanding international AI cooperation. Chen Jiachang, Vice Minister of Science and Technology, said China is making AI a priority in bilateral and multilateral technology cooperation, including capacity development.

Representatives from countries including the United Arab Emirates and Kazakhstan discussed potential cooperation with China across AI, advanced technologies, the digital economy, the internet of things, fintech, medical technology, and software.

More than 200 new products, technologies, achievements, and research reports are expected to be released during the expo, covering embodied AI, intelligent connected vehicles, the low-altitude economy, smart manufacturing, and smart living.

Why does it matter?

The expo reflects China’s effort to position AI as a driver of industrial upgrading, manufacturing competitiveness, and digital economic growth. The focus on sector-specific datasets is particularly important because data infrastructure is becoming a core part of AI industrial policy. The international cooperation messaging also shows how China is using AI events to strengthen technology partnerships and capacity-building ties, especially with countries interested in smart cities, fintech, healthcare technology, and digital infrastructure.

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UK and France launch AI partnership to transform health research

The United Kingdom and France have launched a science and technology partnership focused on applying AI, advanced imaging, and data science to major healthcare challenges, including women’s health, infectious diseases, and antimicrobial resistance.

The UK-France Strategic Biomedical Alliance in Health and AI will bring together institutions including the University of Oxford, Université Paris Cité, Institut Pasteur, Diamond Light Source, and Synchrotron SOLEIL. The partnership aims to make it easier for British and French institutions to cooperate on biomedical research, share expertise, and develop joint projects and funding bids.

The initiative will support research into conditions such as endometriosis and childbirth-related complications, while also improving the detection and treatment of infectious diseases, including tuberculosis, malaria, emerging viruses, and drug-resistant bacteria. Researchers will use AI, data science, and advanced imaging technologies to support earlier diagnoses, more personalised care, and improved preparedness for future health threats.

Alongside the biomedical partnership, the UK and France are strengthening cooperation in high-performance computing. Nearly £900,000 in UK government funding has been committed to a partnership between the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing, which hosts Isambard-AI, and France’s national high-performance computing body GENCI.

The collaboration is expected to give researchers at both centres access to advanced computing resources and support AI research and scientific discovery across multiple fields.

The UK will also contribute £300,000, matched by €330,000 from the French government, to support early-career researchers living and working in both countries. The mobility funding is intended to strengthen research collaboration, including on Horizon Europe projects.

Imperial College London and the French National Centre for Scientific Research will also sign a separate agreement to collaborate on metabolism research, covering health challenges including heart disease, cancer, and neurodegenerative disorders.

Why does it matter?

The partnership shows how AI cooperation is increasingly being embedded in biomedical research, advanced imaging, and high-performance computing infrastructure. By linking health research with supercomputing capacity and researcher mobility, the UK and France are treating AI as part of a broader science diplomacy and innovation agenda, rather than only as a standalone technology policy issue.

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OECD examines local conditions for trustworthy AI transition

The OECD is advancing work on AI and the local conditions needed for a trustworthy, ethical, and sustainable transition, focusing on how countries, regions, and cities can develop AI solutions adapted to local needs.

The project, ‘Seizing the full potential of AI: the local factor’, examines how AI is affecting business functions, public governance, jobs, labour markets, and regional economies. The OECD says generative AI has lowered some barriers to adoption by enabling the use of pre-trained models, but uptake remains uneven across places, people, and firms.

The organisation links stronger AI adoption to innovation-leading regions, especially global technology hubs connected to specialised knowledge networks and global value chains. Regions with weaker innovation performance appear to use AI less and adopt it more slowly, while workforce skills act as both an enabler and a barrier to adoption.

The OECD warns that uneven diffusion could affect competitiveness and territorial cohesion, particularly because technology gaps can be difficult to close once they widen. Businesses, regional governments, and cities also face challenges in integrating AI into legacy systems, adapting labour markets, revising skills and employment policies, financing the transition, and managing risks linked to employment, the environment, land use, and natural resources.

The project focuses on place-based AI strategies, local employment and skills needs, regional development policy, and smart and inclusive cities. Its work aims to help national and subnational policymakers assess AI readiness, strengthen stakeholder engagement, and build the policy capacity needed to support broader AI diffusion.

Why does it matter?

The OECD’s work highlights a key risk in AI adoption: technological divides may become territorial divides. If leading innovation hubs move faster while weaker regions lack skills, infrastructure, financing, or institutional capacity, AI could widen gaps in competitiveness, public service quality, and labour market outcomes. Place-based AI strategies can help policymakers tailor adoption, skills, and investment policies to local conditions rather than relying on one-size-fits-all national approaches.

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Digital Networks Act debate heads to Florence

A conference at the European University Institute in Florence will examine the proposed Digital Networks Act and its implications for the EU regulatory framework for electronic communications.

The event, titled ‘Digital Networks Act for a competitive and secure Europe’, will take place on 28 and 29 May 2026 at the EUI campus and online. It will bring together policymakers, regulators, industry representatives, and academics to assess how the proposal could reshape digital network governance in Europe.

The conference will focus on the Digital Networks Act as a shift from the existing directive-based telecom regime to a directly applicable regulation. Discussions will examine how the proposal could constrain national discretion, centralise selected decisions at the EU level, reduce implementation delays, and address regulatory fragmentation affecting the digital single market.

The proposed Act would repeal and consolidate several core EU telecom instruments, including the European Electronic Communications Code, the BEREC Regulation, the Radio Spectrum Policy Programme, and selected provisions of the Open Internet Regulation and the ePrivacy Directive.

The event will place the proposal in the context of the Commission’s 2023 exploratory consultation on the future of the electronic communications sector, the 2024 White Paper on Europe’s digital infrastructure needs, the 2025 Call for Evidence, and wider debates on competitiveness, resilience, scale, and Europe’s digital economy.

Speakers will also discuss delays in transposing the European Electronic Communications Code, which was due by December 2020 but was fully transposed across all the EU member states only in 2024. The delays are presented as an example of the limits of a directive-based approach, particularly for spectrum assignment, 5G deployment, and convergence with cloud, edge, and AI-enabled infrastructure.

Across keynote addresses and thematic panels, participants will examine access regulation, symmetric and asymmetric remedies, copper switch-off, spectrum and satellite governance, market structure and consolidation, and resilience in digital networks.

Why does it matter?

The conference reflects the growing importance of the Digital Networks Act debate for Europe’s connectivity and digital infrastructure agenda. Moving from a directive-based telecom framework to a directly applicable regulation could shift more decisions to the EU level, reduce national divergence, and reshape how Europe governs spectrum, access regulation, network resilience, satellite connectivity, and future infrastructure linked to cloud, edge, and AI.

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UN launches AI Governance for Humanity Lab in Valencia

The UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies has launched the AI Governance for Humanity Lab in Valencia to strengthen international cooperation on AI governance.

The Lab will focus on improving interoperability between national and regional governance frameworks and supporting practical implementation across regions and sectors. Its work will include network mobilisation, comparative policy analysis, and the development of cooperative tools for AI governance.

The launch brought together policymakers, researchers, industry practitioners, and AI governance experts for workshops and a public event. Discussions focused on two initial workstreams: interoperability in AI governance and the implementation of governance frameworks by private-sector actors.

The interoperability workstream will produce a white paper for UN member states, mapping the fragmented global AI governance landscape and outlining cooperation-oriented policy options ahead of the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva in July 2026.

A second workstream, focused on industry insights, will examine how AI governance frameworks are operationalised within companies and what challenges emerge in practice. The resulting analysis will inform discussions on safe, secure, and trustworthy AI, as well as transparency, accountability, human oversight, and human rights.

The Lab will convene global and regional meetings in Valencia, online, and in other cities. The UN said the meetings are intended to translate research and practice into actionable insights that can support multistakeholder cooperation and inform UN-led AI governance processes.

Why does it matter?

The Lab gives the UN’s AI governance agenda a more practical institutional mechanism. Its focus on interoperability responds to a central problem in global AI policy: national and regional frameworks are developing quickly, but often with limited coordination. By producing comparative analysis, policy options, and industry-focused insights, the Lab could help states and stakeholders reduce fragmentation and connect the Global Digital Compact’s AI commitments with implementation.

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Amnesty International warns that AI models are built on privacy violations

Amnesty International has warned that major generative AI systems are powered by large-scale data pipelines rooted in mass invasions of privacy.

In a new briefing, ‘Unlawful by Design: Exposing the Human Rights Costs of Generative AI’, the organisation argues that companies developing generative AI tools rely on unlawful web scraping to collect vast amounts of online data, including personal information, often without the explicit consent of the people who created or appear in it.

The briefing examines models powering widely used standalone generative AI tools, including OpenAI’s GPT-3, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, DeepSeek, and tools by Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Amnesty says the design choices behind these systems create systemic human rights risks, particularly around privacy, discrimination, freedom of thought, and environmental harms.

Amnesty argues that large-scale scraping and processing of online posts, images, and other personal data infringes privacy by design. It also warns that training datasets drawn from the open web can reproduce and amplify discriminatory content, stereotypes, and prejudices, especially along racial and gender lines.

The organisation also highlights the environmental costs of generative AI development, pointing to rising demand for energy-intensive chips, data centres, electricity, and water. It says AI infrastructure can negatively affect historically marginalised communities when land and resources are used to build and operate data centres.

Amnesty said it wrote to Google, OpenAI, Meta, Stability AI, Midjourney, DeepSeek, Intel, VMware, Microsoft, and Amazon about the findings and related human rights concerns. At the time of publication, it said Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, OpenAI, and Meta had responded.

The organisation is calling on states to prohibit standalone generative AI systems built using unlawful web scraping and to hold companies accountable for human rights abuses linked to the design and deployment of AI systems.

Why does it matter?

The briefing adds a strong human rights framing to the debate over the training data for generative AI. Instead of focusing only on copyright or competition, Amnesty argues that large-scale scraping of personal data raises privacy, discrimination, freedom of thought, and environmental concerns. Its recommendations would significantly raise the stakes for AI developers by treating non-consensual data extraction as a human rights issue requiring regulatory intervention.

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Microsoft expands protections against AI-generated intimate imagery

Microsoft has announced new measures aimed at combating non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), including both authentic and AI-generated content. The company says the changes are designed to make reporting easier for victims, improve detection of harmful content, and strengthen enforcement across Microsoft services.

The initiative comes as the US’s new Take It Down Act enters into force, creating additional legal protections against the distribution of intimate images without consent. Microsoft said both synthetic and authentic NCII can cause significant harm and should be addressed through a unified response.

As part of the update, Microsoft has introduced a redesigned reporting process that allows users to report both real and AI-generated intimate imagery through a simplified global reporting system. The company has also expanded its use of StopNCII.org technology, which creates privacy-preserving digital fingerprints of images to help identify and remove known abusive content across platforms.

Microsoft is further extending the use of validated StopNCII.org hashes across consumer services, including Teams Free, OneDrive and Xbox. The company says it will combine automated detection systems with human review processes while maintaining appeal mechanisms for users affected by moderation decisions.

The company also highlighted broader cooperation with governments, regulators and civil society groups. Microsoft expressed support for the US Take It Down Act, welcomed European efforts targeting AI-powered ‘nudification’ applications, and pointed to upcoming UK Online Safety Act requirements addressing illegal intimate imagery harms.

Why does it matter?

Advances in generative AI have made it easier to create realistic synthetic images, prompting governments and technology companies to strengthen measures against image-based abuse. The announcement reflects a broader trend toward treating AI-generated intimate imagery and authentic non-consensual content under similar safety, moderation and legal frameworks.

The move also highlights growing cooperation between technology companies, regulators and civil society organisations as policymakers develop new approaches to addressing AI-enabled harms online.

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Anthropic opens Milan office, highlights responsible AI development

The US AI company, Anthropic, has announced the opening of a new office in Milan, expanding its European presence alongside existing locations in London, Dublin, Paris, Zurich and Munich. The company says the Italian office will support enterprises, developers and researchers adopting Claude AI while contributing to broader discussions about the societal impact of AI.

The announcement comes shortly after the publication of Pope Leo XIV’s AI-focused encyclical ‘Magnifica Humanitas’. Anthropic highlighted the participation of co-founder Chris Olah in the Vatican presentation, where he discussed the ethical challenges associated with advanced AI and called for wider involvement from governments, academia, civil society and religious institutions in shaping AI’s future.

Anthropic says its technology has already been adopted by several major Italian organisations, including Generali Group, Unipol Group, Angelini Pharma, Bracco Group, Enel Group and Pirelli.

The company also highlighted partnerships with Italian technology firms. According to Anthropic, JAKALA deployed Claude across more than 3,000 users, while Satispay and Bending Spoons have integrated Claude into software development workflows to accelerate engineering and product development.

Anthropic says the Milan office will help support the AI ecosystem of Italy while encouraging broader debate about how advanced AI technologies should be developed and deployed responsibly.

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ENISA identifies risk zone sectors in EU cybersecurity assessment

The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity has released its 2026 NIS360 report, assessing the cybersecurity maturity and criticality of high-criticality sectors under the NIS2 Directive.

The report says cybersecurity maturity across the EU critical sectors has steadily improved as organisations respond to evolving policy requirements and cyber threats. Banking, electricity, and telecommunications remain among the most mature and critical sectors, while trust services, aviation, and financial market infrastructures have moved into the high maturity band.

Gas, road, maritime, and health strengthened their maturity within the moderate band, although ENISA says progress remains uneven across and within sectors. Factors behind the differences include skills shortages, sector-specific characteristics, and organisational size.

The report identifies a ‘risk zone’ covering sectors with lower-than-average maturity and criticality that exceeds their maturity. ENISA lists health, railway, maritime, ICT management services, space, public administrations, and drinking and wastewater as risk-zone sectors, while gas has started moving out of the category.

ENISA says improvements have been driven by cybersecurity legislation, increased political attention, information sharing, collaboration, and operational preparedness. Regulation, including the NIS2 Directive and the Digital Operational Resilience Act, has helped increase investment and encouraged organisations to address vulnerability management, business continuity, disaster recovery, and supply-chain risk.

The report also points to AI, supply-chain and third-party exposure, and geopolitical volatility as major dynamics shaping the cybersecurity environment. ENISA says AI can improve threat detection and response, but can also support more convincing social engineering, shorter exploitation timelines, and broader access to offensive capabilities.

Why does it matter?

The NIS360 report gives the EU policymakers a comparative view of where cybersecurity maturity is improving and where critical sectors remain underprepared. The risk-zone concept is especially useful because it identifies sectors whose importance to society and the economy exceeds their current level of cyber readiness. That makes the report relevant for NIS2 implementation, national supervision, investment priorities, and resilience planning across sectors such as health, public administration, transport, space, and water.

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