Critical infrastructure

€700 million crypto fraud network spanning Europe broken up

Authorities have broken an extensive cryptocurrency fraud and money laundering network that moved over EUR 700 million after years of international investigation.

The operation began with an investigation into a single fraudulent cryptocurrency platform and eventually uncovered an extensive network of fake investment schemes targeting thousands of victims.

Victims were drawn in by fake ads promising high returns and pressured via criminal call centres to pay more. Transferred funds were stolen and laundered across blockchains and exchanges, exposing a highly organised operation across Europe and beyond.

Police raids across Cyprus, Germany, and Spain in late October 2025 resulted in nine arrests and the seizure of millions in assets, including bank deposits, cryptocurrencies, cash, digital devices, and luxury watches.

Europol and Eurojust coordinated the cross-border operation with national authorities from France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Malta, Cyprus, and other nations.

The second phase, executed in November, targeted the affiliate marketing infrastructure behind fraudulent online advertising, including deepfake campaigns impersonating celebrities and media outlets.

Law enforcement teams in Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, and Israel conducted searches, dismantling key elements of the scam ecosystem. Investigations continue to track down remaining assets and dismantle the broader network.

Would you like to learn more about AI, tech and digital diplomacy? If so, ask our Diplo chatbot! 

New AI stroke-imaging tool halves time to treatment

A new AI-powered tool rolled out across England is helping clinicians diagnose strokes much sooner, significantly speeding up treatment decisions and improving patient outcomes. According to a study published in The Lancet Digital Health, roughly 15,000 patients benefited directly from AI-assisted scan reviews.

The tool, deployed at over 70 hospitals, analyses brain scans in minutes to rapidly identify clots, supporting doctors in deciding whether a patient needs urgent procedures such as a thrombectomy. Sites using the AI saw thrombectomy rates double (from 2.3% to 4.6%), compared with more modest increases at hospitals not using the technology.

Time is critical in stroke treatment: each 20-minute delay in thrombectomy reduces a patient’s chance of full recovery by around 1 per cent. The AI-driven system also helped cut the average ‘door-in to door-out’ time at primary stroke centres by 64 minutes, making it far more likely that patients reach a specialist centre in time for treatment.

Health-service leaders say the findings provide real-world evidence that AI imaging can save lives and reduce disability after stroke. As a result, the technology is now part of a wider national rollout across every regularly admitting stroke service in England.

Would you like to learn more about AI, tech and digital diplomacy? If so, ask our Diplo chatbot!

Google boosts Nigeria’s AI development

The US tech giant, Google, has announced a $2.1 million Google.org commitment to support Nigeria’s AI-powered future, aiming to strengthen local talent and improve digital safety nationwide.

An initiative that supports Nigeria’s National AI Strategy and its ambition to create one million digital jobs, recognising the economic potential of AI, which could add $15 billion to the country’s economy by 2030.

The investment focuses on developing advanced AI skills among students and developers instead of limiting progress to short-term training schemes.

Google will fund programmes led by expert partners such as FATE Foundation, the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, and the African Technology Forum.

Their work will introduce advanced AI curricula into universities and provide developers with structured, practical routes from training to building real-world products.

The commitment also expands digital safety initiatives so communities can participate securely in the digital economy.

Junior Achievement Africa will scale Google’s ‘Be Internet Awesome’ curriculum to help families understand safe online behaviour, while the CyberSafe Foundation will deliver cybersecurity training and technical assistance to public institutions, strengthening national digital resilience.

Google aims to create more opportunities similar to those of Nigerian learners who used digital skills to secure full-time careers instead of remaining excluded from the digital economy.

By combining advanced AI training with improved digital safety, the company intends to support inclusive growth and build long-term capacity across Nigeria.

Would you like to learn more about AI, tech and digital diplomacy? If so, ask our Diplo chatbot!

Privacy concerns lead India to withdraw cyber safety app mandate

India has scrapped its order mandating smartphone manufacturers to pre-install the state-run Sanchar Saathi cyber safety app. The directive, which faced widespread criticism, had raised concerns over privacy and potential government surveillance.

Smartphone makers, including Apple and Samsung, reportedly resisted the order, highlighting that it was issued without prior consultation and challenged user privacy norms. The government argued the app was necessary to verify handset authenticity.

So far, the Sanchar Saathi app has attracted 14 million users, reporting around 2,000 frauds daily, with a sharp spike of 600,000 new registrations in a single day. Despite these figures, the mandatory pre-installation rule provoked intense backlash from cybersecurity experts and digital rights advocates.

India’s Minister of Communications, Jyotiraditya Scindia, dismissed concerns about surveillance, insisting that the app does not enable snooping. Digital advocacy groups welcomed the withdrawal but called for complete legal clarity on the revised Cyber Security Rules, 2024.

Would you like to learn more about AI, tech, and digital diplomacy? If so, ask our Diplo chatbot!

Cyber Resilience Act signals a major shift in EU product security

EU regulators are preparing to enforce the Cyber Resilience Act, setting core security requirements for digital products in the European market. The law spans software, hardware, and firmware, establishing shared expectations for secure development and maintenance.

Scope captures apps, embedded systems, and cloud-linked features. Risk classes run from default to critical, directing firms to self-assess or undergo third-party checks. Any product sold beyond December 2027 must align with the regulation.

Obligations apply to manufacturers, importers, distributors, and developers. Duties include secure-by-design practices, documented risk analysis, disclosure procedures, and long-term support. Firms must notify ENISA within 24 hours of active exploitation and provide follow-up reports on a strict timeline.

Compliance requires technical files covering threat assessments, update plans, and software bills of materials. High-risk categories demand third-party evaluation, while lower-risk segments may rely on internal checks. Existing certifications help, but cannot replace CRA-specific conformity work.

Non-compliance risks fines, market restrictions, and reputational damage. Organisations preparing early are urged to classify products, run gap assessments, build structured roadmaps, and align development cycles with CRA guidance. EU authorities plan to provide templates and support as firms transition.

Would you like to learn more about AI, tech, and digital diplomacy? If so, ask our Diplo chatbot!

AstraZeneca backs Pangaea’s AI platform to scale precision healthcare

Pangaea Data, a health-tech firm specialising in patient-intelligence platforms, announced a strategic, multi-year partnership with AstraZeneca to deploy multimodal artificial intelligence in clinical settings. The goal is to bring AI-driven, data-rich clinical decision-making to scale, improving how patients are identified, diagnosed, treated and connected to therapies or clinical trials.

The collaboration will see AstraZeneca sponsoring the configuration, validation and deployment of Pangaea’s enterprise-grade platform, which merges large-scale clinical, imaging, genomic, pathology and real-world data. It will also leverage generative and predictive AI capabilities from Microsoft and NVIDIA for model training and deployment.

Among the planned applications are supporting point-of-care treatment decisions and identifying patients who are undiagnosed, undertreated or misdiagnosed, across diseases ranging from chronic conditions to cancer.

Pangaea’s CEO said the partnership aims to efficiently connect patients to life-changing therapies and trials in a compliant, financially sustainable way. For AstraZeneca, the effort reflects a broader push to integrate AI-driven precision medicine across its R&D and healthcare delivery pipeline.

From a policy and health-governance standpoint, this alliance is important. It demonstrates how multimodal AI, combining different data types beyond standard medical records, is being viewed not just as a research tool, but as a potentially transformative element of clinical care.

Would you like to learn more about AI, tech and digital diplomacy? If so, ask our Diplo chatbot! 

Uzbekistan sets principles for responsible AI

A new ethical framework for the development and use of AI technologies has been adopted by Uzbekistan.

The rules, prepared by the Ministry of Digital Technologies, establish unified standards for developers, implementing organisations and users of AI systems, ensuring AI respects human rights, privacy and societal trust.

A framework that is part of presidential decrees and resolutions aimed at advancing AI innovation across the country. It also emphasises legality, transparency, fairness, accountability, and continuous human oversight.

AI systems must avoid discrimination based on gender, nationality, religion, language or social origin.

Developers are required to ensure algorithmic clarity, assess risks and bias in advance, and prevent AI from causing harm to individuals, society, the state or the environment.

Users of AI systems must comply with legislation, safeguard personal data, and operate technologies responsibly. Any harm caused during AI development or deployment carries legal liability.

The Ministry of Digital Technologies will oversee standards, address ethical concerns, foster industry cooperation, and improve digital literacy across Uzbekistan.

An initiative that aligns with broader efforts to prepare Uzbekistan for AI adoption in healthcare, education, transport, space, and other sectors.

By establishing clear ethical principles, the country aims to strengthen trust in AI applications and ensure responsible and secure use nationwide.

Would you like to learn more about AI, tech and digital diplomacy? If so, ask our Diplo chatbot!

Mistral AI unveils new open models with broader capabilities

Yesterday, Mistral AI introduced Mistral 3 as a new generation of open multimodal and multilingual models that aim to support developers and enterprises through broader access and improved efficiency.

The company presented both small dense models and a new mixture-of-experts system called Mistral Large 3, offering open-weight releases to encourage wider adoption across different sectors.

Developers are encouraged to build on models in compressed formats that reduce deployment costs, rather than relying on heavier, closed solutions.

The organisation highlighted that Large 3 was trained with extensive resources on NVIDIA hardware to improve performance in multilingual communication, image understanding and general instruction tasks.

Mistral AI underlined its cooperation with NVIDIA, Red Hat and vLLM to deliver faster inference and easier deployment, providing optimised support for data centres along with options suited for edge computing.

A partnership that introduced lower-precision execution and improved kernels to increase throughput for frontier-scale workloads.

Attention was also given to the Ministral 3 series, which includes models designed for local or edge settings in three sizes. Each version supports image understanding and multilingual tasks, with instruction and reasoning variants that aim to strike a balance between accuracy and cost efficiency.

Moreover, the company stated that these models produce fewer tokens in real-world use cases, rather than generating unnecessarily long outputs, a choice that aims to reduce operational burdens for enterprises.

Mistral AI continued by noting that all releases will be available through major platforms and cloud partners, offering both standard and custom training services. Organisations that require specialised performance are invited to adapt the models to domain-specific needs under the Apache 2.0 licence.

The company emphasised a long-term commitment to open development and encouraged developers to explore and customise the models to support new applications across different industries.

Would you like to learn more about AI, tech and digital diplomacy? If so, ask our Diplo chatbot!

NVIDIA platform lifts leading MoE models

Frontier developers are adopting a mixture-of-experts architecture as the foundation for their most advanced open-source models. Designers now rely on specialised experts that activate only when needed instead of forcing every parameter to work on each token.

Major models, such as DeepSeek-R1, Kimi K2 Thinking, and Mistral Large 3, rise to the top of the Artificial Analysis leaderboard by utilising this pattern to combine greater capability with lower computational strain.

Scaling the architecture has always been the main obstacle. Expert parallelism requires high-speed memory access and near-instant communication between multiple GPUs, yet traditional systems often create bottlenecks that slow down training and inference.

NVIDIA has shifted toward extreme hardware and software codesign to remove those constraints.

The GB200 NVL72 rack-scale system links seventy-two Blackwell GPUs via fast shared memory and a dense NVLink fabric, enabling experts to exchange information rapidly, rather than relying on slower network layers.

Model developers report significant improvements once they deploy MoE designs on NVL72. Performance leaps of up to ten times have been recorded for frontier systems, improving latency, energy efficiency and the overall cost of running large-scale inference.

Cloud providers integrate the platform to support customers in building agentic workflows and multimodal systems that route tasks between specialised components, rather than duplicating full models for each purpose.

Industry adoption signals a shift toward a future where efficiency and intelligence evolve together. MoE has become the preferred architecture for state-of-the-art reasoning, and NVL72 offers a practical route for enterprises seeking predictable performance gains.

NVIDIA positions its roadmap, including the forthcoming Vera Rubin architecture, as the next step in expanding the scale and capability of frontier AI.

Would you like to learn more about AI, tech and digital diplomacy? If so, ask our Diplo chatbot!

AWS launches frontier agents to boost software development

AWS has launched frontier agents, autonomous AI tools that extend software development teams. The first three – Kiro, AWS Security Agent, and AWS DevOps Agent – enhance development, security, and operations while working independently for extended periods.

Kiro functions as a virtual developer, maintaining context, learning from feedback, and managing tasks across multiple repositories. AWS Security Agent automates code reviews, penetration testing, and enforces organisational security standards.

AWS DevOps Agent identifies root causes of incidents, reduces alerts, and provides proactive recommendations to improve system reliability.

These agents operate autonomously, scale across multiple tasks, and free teams from repetitive work, allowing focus on high-priority projects. Early users, including SmugMug and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, report quicker development, stronger security, and more efficient operations.

By integrating frontier agents into the software development lifecycle, AWS is shifting AI from task assistance to completing complex projects independently, marking a significant step forward in what AI can achieve for development teams.

Would you like to learn more about AI, tech and digital diplomacy? If so, ask our Diplo chatbot!