The new checks, part of the EU's new Entry/Exit System (EES), collect digital personal records of third country nationals travelling to the Schengen area and replace the manual stamping of passports.
Companies across sectors such as banking, industry, and technology report that their digital infrastructure is closely intertwined with American software and cloud platforms. Many organizations rely on services from large American suppliers for office software, cloud storage, and AI applications. According to them, this dependence cannot be reduced quickly without operational disruptions.
It has become increasingly clear how great the challenges are in implementing the directive in a national context, both for us in Sweden and in other EU countries. Therefore, a relaunch at EU level is needed and we are now taking the initiative to do so.
Traditionally, statistics show that most users will trust what they see at the top of a search page. They don't generally question it. That sort of placement alone can give a company a significant advantage, as it can greatly influence and help shape user behavior on a large scale.
"With this law, we are implementing European requirements in a maximally innovation-friendly way and creating lean AI supervision with a clear focus on the needs of the economy," Federal Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger said in a statement.
Yesterday (Jan. 20), the Commission unveiled its revised Cybersecurity Act proposal after months of behind-the-scenes negotiations that reportedly caused substantial friction between officials and member states. This sweeping update introduces measures to identify and potentially exclude "high-risk" third countries and companies from Europe's critical digital infrastructure across 18 essential sectors, including energy systems. As cybersecurity threats continue rising since the original Act took effect seven years ago, the EU is essentially drawing new battle lines in the global tech landscape.
To achieve this, the EC says it is necessary to establish an EU-level spectrum authorization framework, rather than leaving this at national level. It also wants to make mandatory a Europe-wide phase out of copper networks in favor of fiber, with a deadline between 2030 and 2035.
In late December 2025, Elon Musk's AI company xAI updated its Grok chatbot, integrated into the social media platform X, with a new image-editing feature. Within days, users were exploiting it to generate realistic sexualised images of real women and girls without their consent, including content that regulators said depicted minors in a manner that constituted child sexual abuse material.
The groups complain about "the increasing concentration of power and lack of alternatives in digital markets, the push for deregulation, and the urgent need to enforce digital laws to protect our fundamental rights and create a level playing field for competition and innovation."
Its model offered consumers access to all of Setapp's mobile apps through a $9.99 monthly subscription, provided the user's Apple ID was associated with an EU member state. Now, the company says all applications will be removed from Setapp Mobile by the end of the sunset date, February 16, 2026. Applications that are available on Setapp Desktop will not be affected, the company told TechCrunch.
The European Parliament has taken a rare and telling step: it has disabled built-in artificial intelligence features on work devices used by lawmakers and staff, citing unresolved concerns about data security, privacy, and the opaque nature of cloud-based AI processing. The decision, communicated to Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in an internal memo this week, reflects a deepening unease at the heart of European institutions about how AI systems handle sensitive data.
