{"id":9971,"date":"2026-07-01T01:37:40","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T01:37:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/?p=9971"},"modified":"2026-07-01T01:37:40","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T01:37:40","slug":"whats-wrong-with-the-eus-approach-to-a-i-regulation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/?p=9971","title":{"rendered":"What’s wrong with the EU’s approach to A.I. regulation?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Great to hear your thoughts. Now here\u2019s a roundup of other notable A.I. news this past week.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jeremy Kahn\u00a0
<\/strong>@jeremyakahn<\/a>
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com<\/p>\n

A.I. in the news<\/h3>\n

Microsoft adds A.I. to its cybersecurity products. <\/strong>Using machine learning to detect suspicious patterns of network or e-mail traffic has become de rigeur <\/em>for state-of-the-art cybersecurity software, and Microsoft has joined the bandwagon. The software giant announced it had added A.I.-enabled capabilities to several different cybersecurity products and is making them widely available to users. “Microsoft Security solutions help identify and respond to threats 50% faster than was possible just 12 months ago,” Ann Johnson, the company’s VP of cybersecurity, wrote in a blog post announcing the changes.<\/p>\n

A.I. chipmaker Graphcore valued at $2 billion in new funding round.<\/strong> The U.K.-based semiconductor startup, whose specialized chips are designed to accelerate machine learning, says it has raised an additional $150 million in a funding round that values the company at $2 billion, Bloomberg reported.\u00a0 Investors in the latest round include Scottish asset manager Baillie Gifford, Mayfair Equity Partners, and M&G Investments. Microsoft’s Azure cloud datacenters have begun using Graphcore’s chips for some A.I. workloads.\u00a0<\/p>\n

ABB and San Francisco startup create robots that can sort diverse items.<\/strong> Creating machines that can identify, grasp and manipulate an array of items of different shapes, sizes, weights and textures, has been one of the Holy Grails of robotics. Industrial giant ABB, which is already a major producer of robots for the automotive industry, ran a contest challenging researchers to finally crack the problem. Of the 20 teams competing, only Covariant, a San Francisco startup co-founded by Pieter Abbeel, a well-known roboticist and A.I. researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, had a robot that could master the task without human assistance. Now the startup and ABB plan to mass produce the warehouse logistics bots together. You can read my Fortune<\/em> colleague Jonathan Vanian’s story on the development here.<\/p>\n

Google removes gender tags from photo datasets used for A.I. tool. <\/strong>The search giant dropped gender labels, such as “man” and “woman,” from its Cloud Vision API and other tools, which many developers use for image recognition tasks, Business Insider <\/span>reported. The move was pushed by Google’s own in-house data ethicists, including <\/span>Margaret Mitchell<\/a>, and outside data ethics groups such as the Algorithmic Justice League, who said the labels could lead to all kinds of bias\u2014such as systems that would classify most long-haired people as women, and always identify nurses as female or fire fighters as male.<\/span><\/p>\n

McAfee shows Tesla’s computer vision system is frighteningly easy to fool. <\/strong>Researchers at the cybersecurity firm McAfee were able to use black tape to slightly modify the numbers on speed limit signage to fool the autopilot systems in two Teslas, tricking the vehicles into accelerating from 35 mph to 85 mph, even though a human driver would most likely not have misread the speed limits. The news, first reported by\u00a0MIT Technology Review,\u00a0<\/em>shows how vulnerable many A.I. systems are and why it may be necessary for regulators to require such systems are tested against these kind of simple attacks.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Elon Musk calls for more A.I. regulation\u2014including of Tesla.\u00a0<\/strong>The billionaire Tesla founder, who also co-founded OpenAI, took to Twitter<\/a> to say, “All orgs developing advanced AI should be regulated, including Tesla.” Musk was responding to a big feature story on OpenAI in\u00a0MIT Technology Review.\u00a0<\/em>If you have any interest in OpenAI or the quest to achieve artificial general intelligence, then the entire article is worth your time. But the basic takeaway: OpenAI, founded as a non-profit and dedicated to increased transparency in advanced A.I. research, has instead become increasingly secretive, hype-obsessed, and commercially-driven. (I looked at the rationale behind Microsoft’s $1 billion investment into OpenAI in a recent Fortune<\/em> story.)<\/p>\n

While controversy surrounds Clearview, NEC has quietly established market leadership in facial recognition. <\/strong>The New York-based facial recognition startup Clearview has been under scrutiny following investigations into the company from both The New York Times<\/em> and BuzzFeed News, but Japan’s NEC has quietly become perhaps the pre-eminent supplier of facial recognition technology to Western governments and companies. OneZero takes a deep dive into the company and finds that many of the same issues around data gathering and the accuracy of its technology that plague Clearview also apply to NEC.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Political deepfakes\u2014but not for disinformation (yet)<\/h3>\n

An Indian politician has used deepfake technology to produce a series of short campaign films in which he is seen giving the same speech in multiple languages and local dialects\u2014some of which he does not actually speak, Vice reports. Many people have long-feared that deepfakes would be used for political disinformation. But this case shows how the technology can be used to amplify legitimate political messages as well as illegitimate ones. Similar deepfakes have already popped up in innovative advertising campaigns, and some think that a lot more actors may soon be out of work as the technology becomes more mainstream.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Eye on A.I. talent<\/h3>\n