Éric Sadin gets up and paces around the living room of his Paris apartment when an argument excites him. His own voice urges him to do so. He has developed a critical body of thought, brimming with striking headlines and elegant analyses of the future, riding the philosophical and social thinking of the last century to arrive at a scathing conclusion across some 10 books: we have become idiots, and we are on our way to becoming even bigger idiots.

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From the heinous crimes of the Epstein class to the Cornell 7, from the toxic cultures of the “manosphere” to the increase of antisocial relationships with online pornography and AI bots, we need to talk about what is going on with men in our society. We speak with renowned scholar, author, and commentator Dr. Mark Anthony Neal about his new book Save a Seat for Me: Notes on American Fatherhood, and about the ways American capitalism damages everyone and trains boys to become monstrous men.

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• Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

This article was originally published by Truthout on Sept. 30, 2026. It is shared here under a  Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.

The 18^th-century notion of the panopticon — a circular prison design with a guard station in the middle, allowing a single officer to enforce discipline by keeping watch over all the prisoners — has become real in the 21^st century through AI-driven surveillance against workers: It’s the Amazon warehouse.

It should be no surprise that the company that harnessed technology to create a vast, $2.7 trillion empire would employ the same sophistication to enforce workplace discipline and tamp down insurgent unionization efforts. A recent disclosure of Amazon’s internal “employee relations” documents reveals just how extreme Amazon’s methods of warehouse surveillance and control have become.

Amazon employs what it calls the “Atlas” model, inputting into a computerized model a staggering amount of information on workers, their thoughts and behaviors, the workplace environment, and myriad other factors — “hundreds of data points,” according to the company. Atlas produces not just a granular measurement of ongoing worker unrest, worksite by worksite around the world, but also a prediction model for future organizing. It’s like the “precrime” police in the film Minority Report who use psychic powers to identify and apprehend would-be criminals before they act — except in this case, it’s an AI-driven tool used by the billionaire owners of one of the richest companies in history to head off rebellion among its low-wage workforce. And this is not Tom Cruise play-acting; it’s very real.

Workers anywhere who have endured anti-union campaigns can relate to stories of overbearing surveillance by management; the Atlas model, however, takes the spying to an entirely new level.

Details of the Atlas model came to light recently as a result of a legal dispute between Amazon and Unifor, the Canadian private sector union. Last year, British Columbia’s Labour Relations Board awarded union certification to Unifor at Amazon’s YVR2 warehouse outside Vancouver, finding that the company had broadly interfered in the union drive. It was the second union certification at Amazon in North America — the other being the 2022 union win at JFK8 in Staten Island, New York. But in contrast to the U.S., where Amazon has managed to stall bargaining for four and a half years because of weak labor laws, the B.C. Labour Relations Board ordered Amazon to recognize the union and negotiate. Contract bargaining commenced last December.

Not surprisingly, Amazon has dragged its feet in negotiations, prompting the union to file unfair labor practice charges with the Labour Board. Following a series of hearings earlier this year, the Labour Board found that Amazon violated provincial law. In August it ordered a remarkable step — first-contract arbitration at YVR2. That fight remains in play, but as a result of the legal proceedings, Amazon was required to turn over documents to the Labour Board and Unifor. Unifor has shared them with Truthout, and they can be viewed here.

In addition to the Atlas model revelation (beginning on Page 19 of the document), the material includes more than 100 pages that reveal in great detail how Amazon trains its frontline managers in union-busting. My colleague at the Center for Work and Democracy, Ben Fong, has written about this other portion of the disclosed material.

“Amazon’s own documents pull back the curtain on what workers have been telling us for years,” said Justin Gniposky, Unifor’s organizing director. “Behind the friendly PR, Amazon sees workers as property and treats their fundamental right to unionize as a threat to be managed and then eliminated.”

Amazon did not respond to Truthout’s request for comment on the Atlas model.

The documents describe the Atlas model as “a labor risk framework to clarify how Amazon evaluates emerging workforce issues, labor union targets, and internal or external labor threats.” The Atlas model ingests hundreds of data points: employee trainings completed; health and safety incidents, from simple first-aid cases to serious injuries; feedback from workers on management; worker tenure and turnover; the proximity of a warehouse to another workplace experiencing union activity; local minimum wage rates and other area economic conditions; and even the temperatures inside and outside of the warehouse.

Amazon seems especially thorough about scraping data from worker communications channels to plug into the Atlas model — the company’s internal “Voice of the Associate” (VOA) electronic bulletin board, the answers to digital questions posed daily to workers, and externally, forums including Reddit — “to understand the tenor of the discussion at the site level,” according to the documents.

Atlas uses AI to identify phrases and “common keywords” to allow managers to do a “deep dive into the worker population driving the discussion.” Atlas also looks at the upvotes or other responses — positive, negative, or neutral — that the comments elicit, and the volume of those worker reactions. All of these data points go into Atlas and let managers “look around corners to identify developing themes” so they can “tailor strategic responses for addressing emerging risk.”

Amazon also tracks and documents all organizing activities that managers detect, and records them under the category of “employee relations events.” Each activity is assigned a severity score. “High severity” events include employees signing union cards, delegations of workers approaching management with demands, protests, sickouts, and work stoppages.

Atlas uses mathematical modeling to create a point system for all these data points, assigning a “labor score” to each workplace. The scale is further broken down into tiers, with the Tier 5 designation applied to facilities with high scores, where there is “no immediate perceived risk,” and Tier 1 applied to facilities where “future activity is imminent.” Amazon’s union busters focus largely on Tier 1 and 2 facilities.

Atlas produces extensive spreadsheets ranking different facilities and looking not just at raw “labor scores” but also at monthly trends. In 2024, the year the documents date from, Amazon was most concerned about union activity at 16 warehouses it had ranked as Tier 1. For instance, at LDJ5, a Staten Island sortation center across the street from JFK8, Atlas noted that leading issues of worker concern were “bathroom breaks, equipment, rest breaks, leadership/management, temperature.” The spreadsheet noted that “internal activists” — workers — were organizing, and that by looking at month-over-month trends, LDJ5 was experiencing “Risk Increase,” with the phrase placed inside a bright red box. At four of these Tier 1 facilities, the spreadsheet noted, the threat of union activity was sufficiently high to justify deploying Amazon’s “rapid response” team: union busters who travel to hotspots of organizing throughout Amazon’s global network.

But the main value of Atlas seems to be predictive. For the Tier 2 worksites (“future activity is highly probable”), the spreadsheet poses these questions: “Which sites are showing the most future risk that are not Tier 1 sites yet?” and “What is the risk in each business line and which has the most risk, is it increasing or decreasing? What is driving the risk?” Tier 2 spreadsheets in the document look at the number of investigations of workers that management has handled in the last month, whether that number is trending up or down, the number of worker appeals of those investigations, and — notably — the percentage of negative worker comments on internal bulletin boards.

Voice of the Associate and other internal bulletin boards are key focal points. Charts in the document track how often workers raise particular topics, like weather, time off, breakroom amenities, management treatment, and restroom cleanliness. They also analyze the “vector” of each issue: “What are the top drivers of negative Sentiment and change MoM [month over month]?” is one question posed in the document. “What Sites are spiking MoM in negative sentiment? What themes are driving the sentiment? What anecdotes can we pull?”

Atlas is not strictly a North American tool. One chart analyzes trends for warehouses globally, documenting “employee relations events” — worker organizing — and cataloguing the number of worker comments on Voice of the Associate and the percentage of those comments that were negative. Two warehouses in the English Midlands where workers have been organizing with the GMB union — both Tier 1 sites in Atlas’ taxonomy — showed high volumes of negative VOA posts. A warehouse in Melbourne, Australia, also showed mostly negative Voice of the Associate posts, while posts were mostly not negative in some of the warehouses in Poland, Germany, and Italy.

All this is surely a tiny sliver of Atlas’s output. The former head of Amazon’s HR platforms, Bud Cashatt, boasted on LinkedIn recently about how his department created “predictive site-risk ML touching every building in Amazon’s global network.” (“ML” stands for machine learning, where programmers train AI to learn patterns and build predictions based on analyzing vast quantities of data.)

Did Jeremy Bentham, the 18^th-century British philosopher who dreamed up the panopticon, anticipate Atlas? Nearly 250 years ago, he imagined his panopticon as a useful tool for prisons, “madhouses,” and also “to the business of manufactories,” the industrialized manufacturing plants then just emerging in England. Speaking of his watchman in the center of the operation — the human Atlas of his time — Bentham wrote, “The concealment of his person will be of use.”

The documents uncovered at the B.C. Labour Board shine a light on Amazon’s concealed watchman. Atlas illustrates just how far Amazon will go to try to rule the warehouse floor. And its scope also underscores just how terrified Amazon’s masters are of their own workforce rising up and claiming their due.

Bentham theorized that the panopticon would facilitate social control: He imagined that incarcerated people would behave, not knowing at any moment whether they were being watched by the guard. It was, he wrote, “A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.”

But what happens when prisoners — or workers — resist such attempts at social control? There’s no level of AI sophistication that can erase the reality that Amazon’s workers move millions of packages every day, and without their labor, the Amazon supply chain collapses.

Peter B. Olney, the retired organizing director of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, calls Atlas “a promethean tool for union busting and the thwarting of any employee organizing.”

To fight back against this “existential threat” to basic worker rights and unions, Olney says, “we have to get real about deploying massive resources towards organizing the workforce and finding their serious vulnerabilities and choke points.”

Today we see emerging fights everywhere against a billionaire class intent on harnessing AI and technology to undermine basic democracy and impose authoritarianism, both in the workplace and throughout society: in revolts against the algorithmically driven content we are force-fed on the internet; protests against and sabotage of the Flock cameras on neighborhood lampposts; and resistance against the replacement of workers with bots and computers. The Atlas model places Amazon workers at the center of this global fight against the AI billionaires. And it highlights that union organizing at Amazon is not just a battle over economics; it’s also a fight for basic freedom and democracy.

How seriously should we take the latest AI doom warnings from the technocrats? It's unclear, says Matt Ridley – but it's hard to give much credence to those who have ignored the very real threat from man-made viruses.

The post How Seriously Should We Take AI Doom Warnings? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

On the night of 12 November 1993, a slim, young Brazilian named Royce Gracie stepped into an octagonal cage in Denver, Colorado, and found himself staring up into the eyes of a giant. Gerard Gordeau, a Dutch kickboxer, stood five inches taller, weighed almost three stone more than him, and had an extra decade of fighting experience under his belt. Now the pair were about to engage in bare-knuckle combat: no judges, no separation of opponents by size, no respite until someone either got knocked out cold or begged for mercy.

The fight lasted barely 100 seconds. In that time, Gracie calmly tripped Gordeau up, jumped on his back, and clutched at his throat, forcing the big man to hammer the floor in submission.

About 80,000 pay-per-view spectators watched Gracie’s legendary victory – the finale of the first ever Ultimate Fighting Championship – live on television. Among them was an unassuming business studies student living in San Diego, California. Mesmerised by what he had seen, the student presented himself at a local martial arts academy that specialised in Brazilian jiu-jitsu – the discipline employed by Gracie to humble Gordeau in the cage – and asked to begin lessons. His classmates found it hard to take the newcomer seriously. “I was there the day he showed up,” said Kid Peligro, who went on to become one of the biggest jiu-jitsu stars in the world. “He was wearing shorts, flip-flops and a tank-top; he sat in the corner and barely spoke to anybody.”

The student, who introduced himself as Ben, was in his mid-20s and hailed from the Middle East, but revealed little else about his background. Peligro assumed that he served as the butler or bodyguard to the rich Englishman who sometimes accompanied him to lessons. “Ben was quiet, and he was dedicated,” Peligro told me. “He would often stay behind after class to sweep the mats.” Ben also took physical pain in his stride, even when it involved fractured bones. “If you trained in jiu-jitsu in the 1990s, you were going to get hurt,” said Bobby Razak, a film producer and martial arts enthusiast. “It wasn’t like it is now: very clean, very professional. Back then, it was raw.”

After more than a year of training, Ben made a startling announcement: he was about to return home to Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, and would be taking the academy’s founder, Nelson Monteiro, along with him. Other invitations soon followed. Rumours spread that Ben was trying to establish his own martial arts centre on the shores of the Persian Gulf. One day, Peligro and his wife were sent a pair of first-class flight tickets to the UAE, worth $24,000 each. When they stepped off the plane, they were astonished to see pictures of a familiar-looking man – clearly Ben’s father – everywhere they turned, from billboards to banknotes. “Ben’s training centre turned out to be one of his family’s palaces,” Peligro said, still marvelling at the memory. “It’s like a fairytale.”

For those trying to uncover the truth behind His Highness Sheikh Tahnoon bin (or “Ben”) Zayed Al Nahyan – royal fixer, reclusive spymaster, financial behemoth – fairytales are nearly all we have to go on. Tahnoon, who really did enrol in Nelson Monteiro’s class under a pseudonym and eventually went on to become a jiu-jitsu black belt in his own right, now sits atop an economic fortune larger than the GDP of several major countries, and is closely entwined both personally and financially with the Trump White House. The global holdings overseen by Tahnoon span windfarms in Scotland and spaceships in Texas, Rihanna’s lingerie line and Richard Caring’s Ivy restaurants. From hospitals to housing blocks, solar farms to ski resorts, there is almost no place on Earth untouched by his financial firepower.

But despite his ever-growing influence on the world stage, Tahnoon prefers to remain in the shadows. He has never given a substantive interview to the press. Those who have worked closely with him are almost always made to sign non-disclosure agreements. Very few people outside the UAE even know his name. “He’s quiet,” says one former US national security official, “and he’s always everywhere.” Sheikh Tahnoon did not respond to an interview request for this article. The UAE foreign ministry did not offer any other senior government figure for interview, and declined to provide any comment.

Tahnoon’s power is soon going to extend over more human lives than ever before. As one of the most important AI financiers on the planet, he is rapidly embedding himself within the infrastructure that will underpin our digital future: its information pipelines and its microchip foundries, its datacentres and the enormous energy plants needed to power and cool them. Some see him as a technological prophet and saviour. Others compare him to a Bond villain. So who is the real “Ben”, and what are his plans for the rest of us?

Anyone trying to find Sheikh Tahnoon must first navigate concentric circles of gatekeepers. These include his closest business associates, as well as a cast of more colourful characters: the former Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri, for example, or Melissa Moncada, one-time winner of the Miss Globe Colombia beauty pageant, and now a fitness entrepreneur. Even if you get this far, it may not be enough to be granted an audience, and supplicants go to extraordinary lengths to stand out from the crowd.

These scattered landmarks form the backstage of the modern Emirates. Together, they also tell the story of the six brothers who have come to dominate the country – a story that began more than half a century ago, with their father, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the UAE’s first leader following independence from Britain in 1971. During his 33-year reign, a loose network of Bedouin tribespeople living among mud-brick forts and palm-frond houses was transformed into an oil-rich regional superpower, home to some of the tallest buildings on Earth.

Zayed married seven times and is believed to have fathered at least 30 children. But it was the offspring of his third and favourite wife, Fatima Al Ketbi, who – under her tutelage – emerged as their nation’s powerbrokers. Tahnoon was one of them. Today, he and his siblings – known as the bani Fatima, or “sons of Fatima” – sit at the apex of arguably the wealthiest dynasty in the world.

Tahnoon and his brothers grew up steeped in a worldview that placed their family at the centre of the universe. Any form of dissent was seen as an existential threat, not just to their own power but also to the small and fragile state they were responsible for protecting. “The family is the first school of values, the authentic guardian of identity, and the truest source of trust and belonging,” their mother, Fatima, once said, reflecting both the paternalistic ethics that prevail among the Emirati elite, and the Al Nahyans’ visceral hostility towards alternative ideologies such as socialism or political Islam. By the time Tahnoon returned from the US in 1995, a state-sponsored crackdown on Islamist civil society groups was under way, alongside reprisals against smaller emirates that resisted it.

During this period, the UAE’s leadership became increasingly conscious that money alone could not buy them international clout. Despite oil finds in the Gulf, it was the big Arab republics such as Egypt and Syria that still dominated the Middle East, both diplomatically and culturally. Military strength and strategic influence were needed to propel the Emirates into the big time. In the final years of his reign, Sheikh Zayed ensured that the bani Fatima were favourably positioned to drive this project forward.

As a younger brother, Tahnoon knew that the Abu Dhabi throne – and consequently the presidency of the UAE, which always accompanies it – was not destined for him. Instead, he was given the task of running his father’s private department, which oversaw Sheikh Zayed’s extensive personal assets, including palaces, farms and overseas landholdings such as London’s Berkeley Square. The role demanded a blend of charm and coercion, and the deployment of hard cash. By the late 1990s Tahnoon was making the latter his speciality, founding a company called the Royal Group that became the primary investment vehicle for his family’s many business interests. The group’s assets are currently worth $300bn.

Following Sheikh Zayed’s death in 2004, Tahnoon’s reputation as the UAE’s top money man grew. As comfortable in the boardrooms of Wall Street as he was in the Emirati majlis (the traditional court of the tribal ruler), Tahnoon melded the rhetoric of Bedouin values – duty, loyalty and humility – with a new vocabulary of technocratic managerialism. Today, the country’s largest sovereign wealth vehicle is run by Tahnoon; so is First Abu Dhabi Bank, its largest lender, and Alterra, the biggest climate investment fund in the world. In the UK alone, Tahnoon oversees healthcare providers and property giants, and controls investments in public utilities such as Thames Water. The economic empire he oversees is estimated to be worth about $1.5tr, as large as the entire economic output of Indonesia or Turkey.

But the line between Tahnoon’s personal fortune, the wider wealth of the Abu Dhabi royal family, and collective assets held – at least in theory – by the citizenry of the UAE, is blurry. According to the bani Fatima, that division is moot, as the wellbeing of the Al Nahyans is indistinguishable from the wellbeing of the nation at large. Not everyone agrees. “A lot of merchants in the UAE complain constantly – very quietly, very privately – about how Tahnoon crowds them out of the market,” Mira Al Hussein, an Emirati sociologist based at the University of Edinburgh, told me. In healthcare, for example, sovereign wealth funds and Tahnoon’s own corporate vehicles dominate the local industry; the private sector “cannot compete”, one senior executive recently told the Financial Times. “The general perception is that the country is a ship,” said Al Hussein, “and if that ship ever begins to sink, then the ruling family will jump off and take all of the wealth funds and investments and portfolios with them.”

Tahnoon is obsessed with winning. In the late 1990s, the sheikh became so determined to beat his brothers at the newly released video game Age of Empires – in which players attempt to transform pre-modern societies into monumental civilisations by hoarding resources and overpowering opponents – that he hired one of the game’s software developers to coach him. By the early 2000s, his attention had switched to chess. He personally financed the development of a refrigerator-sized supercomputer called Hydra, which soon became the most powerful chess player in the world, beating several grandmasters along the way. Hydra could only ever be used by a single person at a time. For hours at a stretch, day and night, that person was Tahnoon. In 2005, Hydra’s chief architect claimed in an online chess forum that Tahnoon was the greatest computer-chess freak alive.

Tahnoon has brought all these skills – fierce competitiveness, the careful accumulation of positional advantage, and an abiding fascination with melding human ingenuity and computing intelligence – to the financial realm. They have also proved vital in his other main role: as the man in charge of national security in the Emirates, and his country’s spymaster-in-chief.

Many of the individuals targeted by Tahnoon’s security apparatus can’t share their testimony. The UAE has a long history of enforced disappearances, secret detention sites and vicious reprisals against the family members of exiled dissidents – all extensively documented by international human rights organisations. But some survive to tell their tale.

In April 2018, Matthew Hedges, a young British academic, travelled to the UAE to conduct research for his PhD exploring the country’s national security strategy, a subject that touches directly on Tahnoon’s domain. By the end of his two-week visit, Hedges had started to feel uneasy. “I knew I was being followed,” he told me recently.

Entering Dubai airport on his way back to the UK, Hedges got no further than passport control. There he says he found a large group of masked men waiting for him, all dressed in black and carrying guns. He alleges that he was blindfolded, handcuffed and thrown in the back of an SUV. He was accused of working as a British spy and over the months of solitary confinement that followed, he says he was subjected to interrogations lasting up to 15 hours a day and made to swallow a cocktail of medications against his will. His captors allegedly threatened him with rendition to an overseas military base, and warned that they could harm his relatives. Following seven months of maltreatment, Hedges attempted to take his own life. “I knew their threats to be meaningful, because I knew the country,” he told me.

In the room where he was questioned by officials, Hedges says he saw bloodstains on the carpet and bloody footprints on the walls. “They were above my head height, and facing down,” he told me. “I’m over 6ft tall, so that means someone had been lifted up there.” When I asked Hedges who was ultimately responsible for his ordeal, he ran carefully up the chain of command within the Emirati security services, reciting names and job titles, before sitting quietly for a moment and taking a breath. “Then you get above the clouds,” he replied, eventually. “Then there is Tahnoon.” (In a government statement issued in 2023, the UAE insisted that Hedges “received entirely proper care … He was never subjected to, or threatened with, either torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of any sort.”)

Hedges ultimately confessed to a series of crimes, but insists that he did so under duress. In November 2018, following a hearing that lasted only five minutes, at which there was no defence lawyer present, he was sentenced to life in jail by an Emirati court. Following a diplomatic row with the British government, he was later granted a royal pardon. After his release, the UAE government mounted a smear campaign against him that included the release of a 19-page dossier of personal information including a psychiatric report. Compared with many others who pass through the country’s interrogation cells, he got off lightly. “Hedges’ experience is unfortunately common in the UAE, and abuses against Emirati civil society are even more repressive,” said Joey Shea, a senior Gulf researcher for Human Rights Watch.

Supporters of the Emirati regime bridle at this sort of criticism. They insist that it is grounded in western resentment at the UAE’s rise, and overlooks the unique security threats the nation faces from hostile neighbours and ideological insurgents. “The UAE has become a success story, and that’s led to you guys thinking, ‘Wait, these were the little ducklings that we used to run and now look at what they’re doing,’” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati professor of political science who is well connected to ruling officials in the UAE. “I resent the claim that the UAE must ‘level up’ to international standards [on human rights]. You have your standard, we have ours.”

The Al Nahyan dynasty has good reason to feel insecure. Located on the tip of a landmass roiled by conflict to the north and south, and staring out across the Gulf at its far larger rival Iran, the UAE’s petro-riches make it an obvious target. Tahnoon and his brothers also know that their brand of autocratic monarchy is despised by political Islamists and pro-democracy Arab revolutionaries alike. Some 20 years ago, Christopher Davidson, an expert in Gulf politics at Durham University, spoke to one of the bani Fatima about the Emirates’ rising prestige. “He said to me, ‘You need to understand the mindset of this region. Others will try to take that away from us, or destroy us’,” Davidson recalled. “‘Whether it’s Iran, Yemen, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda … they’ll all be coming, one after another.’”

For the UAE’s leaders, the 9/11 attacks – perpetrated by a group of extremists that included two Emiratis – were a realisation of their darkest fears about violent enemies lurking within, and helped fuel an obsession with Islamism that persists to this day. (The UAE has been linked to covert funding and political support for far-right political parties in Europe who are seen to share Abu Dhabi’s perspective on this issue.) The US war on terror was also a moment of opportunity, enabling the Al Nahyans to present themselves to Washington as an island of stability within an otherwise forbidding region.

Throughout the 2000s, the Emirati regime ramped up its intelligence activities and increasingly focused on espionage technologies. The aim was to mitigate the country’s most obvious vulnerability: its tiny native population of 1.4 million people, which comprises only 11% of the UAE’s total residents, and makes it hard for the country to raise a significant army or to function in the absence of foreigners. By the end of the decade, it had struck a landmark security deal with the former US counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who was instrumental in lobbying Congress for more intrusive surveillance programmes both at home and abroad. Clarke moved out to Abu Dhabi and set up a secretive UAE spying unit, which was given the codename Project Raven.

Initially billed as a vital cog in the “war on terror”, Project Raven morphed into a vast and pervasive digital wiretap operation targeting not only Emiratis accused of terrorism, but many others merely suspected of being unfriendly to the UAE’s dictatorship. Although technically an Emirati initiative, much of the team running Project Raven were former US National Security Agency spies, Washington contractors and senior White House veterans. “The incentive was to help in the fight against terrorism,” Clarke later insisted. “The UAE is a very good counterterrorism partner.”

By 2011, when anti-government uprisings erupted across the Arab world, the focus of Project Raven’s energies had become clear. After a group of prominent Emirati judges, lawyers and journalists put their names to a petition calling for mild democratic reforms, the state’s response was uncompromising; over the next two years the majority of them were arrested, and dozens of signatories remain in jail today. More paranoid than ever, and harbouring fears that Emirati soldiers might refuse to turn their guns on fellow Muslims in the event of widespread street protests, the bani Fatima mobilised an 800-strong paramilitary force of Colombian and South African mercenaries to tighten their grip on power, and even greater resources were funnelled into digital hacking operations. To the Al Nahyans, mass politics was a threat: in their eyes, grateful subjects could only ever petition their leaders for concessions, never make demands of them as citizens. “The UAE’s internal security structure increasingly prioritised regime protection above all else,” said Mira Al Hussein.

It was against this backdrop that Tahnoon – alongside his role as the UAE’s money man – began rising up the ranks of the Emirati security establishment. In 2014, he became the country’s deputy national security adviser; two years later, he assumed the top job. As security chief, his new brief included some of the UAE’s most sensitive diplomatic missions, among them the breaking of a decades-long taboo in the Arab world by normalising relations with Israel. As the Middle East’s other leader in the field of cyber-espionage, Israeli intelligence had much to offer the Emiratis: not least access to Pegasus, the most advanced spyware ever built. With Pegasus, operatives were able to infiltrate almost any Apple or Android device without the user’s knowledge, and transform it into a permanent, pocket-sized spy.

Under Tahnoon’s stewardship, Project Raven – control of which had now passed into the hands of a private, state-linked Emirati company named DarkMatter – scaled up its hacking and surveillance activities. Local dissidents and suspicious foreigners on Emirati soil were targeted. But so, too, were human rights activists, journalists and politicians all over the world. Fiona Shackleton, a high-profile British divorce lawyer representing an estranged wife of the ruler of Dubai – whose other clients have included Prince Charles and Paul McCartney – was one such victim. Then UK prime minister Boris Johnson is believed to have been another. It seemed that no matter who you were, if you were deemed to threaten the interests of the Al Nahyan family and their friends, even tangentially, then you were a potential target.

In early 2019, a Reuters investigation – building on work by the Canadian research group The Citizen Lab – exposed much of Project Raven’s operations, and multiple legal proceedings were launched in the US against the initiative’s American contractors. Over the next year, Tahnoon officially shut down DarkMatter and broke apart its various entities. By that time, it appears he was nursing more ambitious plans.

A powerful new frontier in computing power – artificial intelligence – was just beginning to open up. To be genuinely transformative, this technology was going to require fantastical amounts of cash and data. By fusing together elements of his business and security empires, Tahnoon would be in a unique position to supply both. A company like no other was about to be born.

In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a superintelligent computer programme named Deep Thought is asked “the great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything’”. After seven and a half million years, it finally delivers its famous answer: 42. Deep Thought goes on to say that, in order to explain its answer, it needs to design another giant computer programme. This one will be called “Earth”, and one of its core operational components will be human beings.

In this vision, the number 42 represents more than the meaning of life. It speaks to a world in which every facet of reality can ultimately be reduced to lines of code, and where ordinary people unwittingly live out their days in the service of computers rather than the other way around. In the late 2010s, when Tahnoon refashioned the ruins of DarkMatter into a new AI-focused company, he decided to honour Adams by calling it Group 42, or G42 for short.

G42 is the culmination of Tahnoon’s dual identity as a financier and spymaster, and the scale of its aspirations is staggering. Like many other tech giants, it aims to reconceptualise AI as a foundational form of infrastructure like water or electricity – a concept known as the “intelligence grid”. Unlike its Silicon Valley peers, however, G42’s intelligence grid has grown out of an actual nation state’s intelligence apparatus. The company’s marketing heavily emphasises its security capabilities, promising “real-time threat defence” for governments and businesses, and predictive tools that encompass “suspect profiling”, “relationship mapping” and “behavioural analysis”.

The tech industry is not short on exaggeration and bombast. Compared with many of his Silicon Valley peers, however, Tahnoon – a true AI believer who claims to have designed the entirety of one of his homes via ChatGPT – is in a unique position to deliver. G42 built on the espionage talents behind Project Raven and DarkMatter: Peng Xiao, who was the head of a key DarkMatter unit, is now G42’s CEO; Karim Sabbagh, DarkMatter’s former boss, currently runs one of G42’s main subsidiaries. One of G42’s first public products was a popular messaging app called ToTok, which was later revealed by the New York Times to be a piece of spyware, designed to “track every conversation, movement, relationship, appointment, sound and image of those who install it on their phones”.

In a statement to the Guardian, G42 denied that the company’s origins lay in cyber-espionage operations, or that it conducts or enables unlawful surveillance. “G42 was established as an AI and technology company focused on cloud and AI infrastructure,” the firm said. “Our businesses operate under applicable laws, contractual data protections, and rigorous security and compliance frameworks.”

If US tech giants are wary of G42’s links to cyberhacking, they are doing a good job of hiding it. Microsoft has invested $1.5bn in the company and its vice-chair, Brad Smith, now has a seat on G42’s board of directors. G42 and its specialist AI investment fund – also chaired by Tahnoon – are either direct investors in or major partners of Anthropic, xAI and OpenAI. Sam Altman, the latter’s CEO, calls Tahnoon “a dear personal friend”. Microsoft and OpenAI were approached for comment on this article, but neither company provided a response. In its statement to the Guardian, G42 noted that its partnership with Microsoft “is governed by a binding agreement developed in consultation with the US and UAE governments, covering cybersecurity, data protection, responsible AI, export controls and business integrity”.

Tahnoon’s appeal to Silicon Valley is obvious. After all, if you’re going to go into business with a cash-laden Gulf autocrat, then picking one who presides over a heavily digitised state-security empire – and who boasts a proven track record of hoovering up humongous amounts of personal data, the raw ingredient upon which your technology depends – feels like a logical choice. Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Elon Musk may all be hugely influential AI leaders, but none of them simultaneously runs the CIA.

Another powerful figure to have clutched Tahnoon and G42 close to his bosom is Donald Trump, who has hosted lavish state banquets for the sheikh at the White House and posed for photos with him in the Oval Office. The American security services have long harboured fears about Emirati influence on US politics: in 2022 the National Intelligence Council produced a confidential report for Washington policymakers warning of Abu Dhabi’s “illegal and legal attempts to steer US foreign policy”. Joe Biden’s administration restricted the export of AI chips to the UAE because of concerns over the country’s close ties to China. But last year Trump reversed that decision, authorising the transfer of hundreds of thousands of Silicon Valley’s most advanced chips to the Al Nahyan regime. Many of them will go straight to G42.

The deal was announced only two weeks after one of Tahnoon’s investment vehicles acquired $2bn-worth of cryptocurrency issued by World Liberty, a company owned by the Trump family, who earn interest on all its reserves. Tahnoon is also a direct investor in World Liberty, having purchased 49% of the firm less than a month before Trump’s second inauguration. Both the White House and World Liberty have denied any connection between Tahnoon’s investments and the chip transfer. A spokesperson for G42 told the New York Times that the company was “grounded in integrity”.

“Corruption, plain and simple,” is how the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren describes the murky entanglement of Tahnoon’s money and the US White House. But the rapid ascent of Tahnoon and G42 within the AI industry reflects a sincerely held conviction on the part of both the Trump administration and the bani Fatima that AI is set to replace oil as the elemental global commodity – and ultimate determinant of global power – and that now is the time to master it.

The result is that G42, under Tahnoon’s control, has successfully positioned itself at the heart of global AI infrastructure for decades to come. The “AI campus” currently being constructed on the UAE’s coastline is projected to have a 5GW power capacity, up to 250 times the size of the largest hyperscale datacentres today. G42 is helping to finance a $500bn rollout of new datacentres within the US, and has now acquired several of the construction companies involved. Last year, Microsoft and G42 officially co-launched the Responsible AI Future Foundation, designed to shape “ethical development and deployment of AI systems”. It is headquartered – of course – in Abu Dhabi.

Does it matter if significant chunks of our AI infrastructure sit in the hands of a man with the entire arsenal of a police state at his disposal? One person who might be able to answer that is Ahmed Mansoor, a mild-mannered Emirati electrical engineer and aspiring poet. In the early 2010s, Mansoor was among that group of public intellectuals who signed a petition calling for the creation of an elected parliament in the UAE; he also ran a website on which content critical of the Al Nahyan regime was sometimes posted. In April 2011, he was arrested on multiple charges, including the defamation of the bani Fatima, but initially released thanks to a presidential pardon.

In the years that followed, though, Mansoor was relentlessly targeted by the Emirati security services, who spent millions of dollars attempting to gain access to his electronic devices, and those of his wife. Eventually, Mansoor succumbed to a malicious email attachment, which sent all of his private data to a computer server registered to PO box 5151 in Abu Dhabi: the postal address of Sheikh Tahnoon’s personal office. He later found out that his baby monitor had also been hacked, turning it into a camera and microphone that captured every moment of his family life. He was arrested again in 2017, subjected to a secret trial, and convicted of insulting the “status and prestige of the UAE and its symbols, including its leaders”. Sentenced to 10 years in jail, he has remained in solitary confinement in al-Sadr, the maximum-security jail located about 10 miles south-west of G42’s AI mega-campus, ever since.

We don’t know if Tahnoon will use his commanding position at the heart of the AI industry to directly hack, surveil and intimidate critics, as his security services did with Mansoor. But the character of those controlling this new technology matters. Today, we don’t just use major tech platforms to store files and send messages: more and more people use AI to be their therapist, friend or even lover. Tech executives assure us that our data is safe from prying eyes but ordinary citizens have very few ways of verifying this. In its pomp, the early smartphone manufacturer BlackBerry insisted that “privacy and security form the crux of everything we do”. It failed to mention that BlackBerry was secretly working with the cybersecurity unit of a foreign government at the time, and helping it to carry out digital surveillance of mobile users. That cybersecurity unit was the UAE’s DarkMatter group, the precursor to G42.

The potential risks of untrustworthy actors controlling AI may be more insidious than direct hacking and surveillance. A group of researchers recently revealed that AI tools – including products from Meta, Google and SpaceX – are regularly altering the meaning of texts on sensitive political topics, in ways that could reshape public opinion. “I’m very worried about Tahnoon’s perception of the world,” says Al Hussein. “He’s the video-game prince who wants to press a button and eliminate all threats.”

For a glimpse of what a world reshaped in Tahnoon’s image might look like, consider the UAE. Here, political parties are nonexistent, trade unions and labour strikes prohibited, and protests and lèse-majesté met with rapid punishment. Migrant workers, who make up the vast majority of the country’s residents, are kept in a state of legalised insecurity and suffer from thousands of officially unexplained deaths each year, which human rights organisations attribute to heat stress, construction accidents and other poor working conditions. Businesses, by contrast, can pick and choose the regulations that govern them from a patchwork quilt of 40-odd “freezones”, all competing to lure investors with bespoke tax regimes and legal frameworks.

Beyond the UAE’s borders, Abu Dhabi’s dominion encompasses a vast network of ports, security partners, client regimes and financial flows spanning the Red Sea and huge swathes of north, eastern and central Africa. Often presented as a neutral entrepot, torn between rival global power blocs to the east and the west, the reality is that the UAE has always served faithfully as capital’s emirate: shielding the wealth of international elites, opening up inhospitable markets, paving the way for western investors, and – as Colin Powers, a political economist specialising in the Middle East, puts it – “energetically extending the circuitry of global wealth accumulation”.

Under the bani Fatima, this function has included the brutal suppression of any democratic experiment within the Emirati field of influence that might threaten the material interests of the Al Nahyans or their allies. In Egypt, the UAE has helped sustain the military dictatorship of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, which has turned its guns upon thousands of protesters. In Yemen, Libya and Ethiopia, it has armed paramilitaries and fuelled shocking levels of state violence against civilians. In Sudan, it is accused of complicity in genocide. In response, Abu Dhabi has deployed AI tools as part of a sophisticated disinformation campaign designed to discredit the United Nations. Several dissidents wanted by other dictatorships – from Iran to Saudi Arabia and Rwanda – have also been kidnapped while transiting through Dubai airport, before being “delivered” by the Emiratis to their home country’s security forces. Not all of Abu Dhabi’s foreign adventures have been successful; many have led to military quagmires and reputational damage on the world stage. But for those on the receiving end of Emirati intervention, the consequences have been dire.

The imperial ambitions of Tahnoon and his brothers do not seem to rest on direct occupation of land, but rather on controlling key “nodes” outside their borders: the sites at which the movement of money, arms, trade, technology and ideas intersect. AI, the functioning of which is distributed across territories around the world, is the ideal asset for a nodal empire. Tahnoon’s goal of making the UAE an AI superpower is framed domestically as part of his family’s historic mission to improve the lot of the Emirati people. But the UAE’s accumulation of power in recent decades has been delivered on the bani Fatima’s own terms. Central to the Al Nahyan family’s worldview is the notion that, amid a planet riven by the chaos and humiliation of democracy, their nation is a demonstration that things can and should work differently. According to Tahnoon’s brother, President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, “The UAE is a tangible model for the world.”

With his array of spy tools, superyachts and supercomputers, his preference for remaining far from public view, his habit of always wearing dark glasses in public (even indoors), and – of course – his obsession with personal longevity (he aims to live to 150), it would be easy to characterise Tahnoon as a cartoon villain. But in truth, this is not a story about a malevolent prince plotting vile deeds from his palace in the Persian Gulf. It is a far more prosaic tale about how power and money function in the world today.

In Washington, just as in Abu Dhabi, politics is increasingly governed by personal relationships and transactional gains rather than popular demands. In the UK, as in the UAE, firms such as Palantir that offer AI-enabled surveillance and data crunching are being integrated with the basic functions of the state. All over the planet, business-friendly strongmen are the order of the day. “For the last 20 years, democracy has been in decline,” said Ronald Deibert, the founder and director of The Citizen Lab. “That happens to coincide with an enormous expansion of digital surveillance capabilities for both commercial and national security purposes. The epicentre of a lot of this is the UAE. And where do all roads lead in the UAE? They lead to Sheikh Tahnoon.”

On 27 February, Tahnoon chaired a board meeting at G42’s AI investment fund. That night, the sky above Abu Dhabi’s seafront lit up with the flashes of US and Israeli missiles raining down across the Persian Gulf, marking the start of the Iran war. One of Tehran’s first acts of retaliation was to directly bomb two AI datacentres in the UAE. The Iranian government soon published an official list of what they considered “legitimate” military targets which included the Emirati offices of US technology companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Western journalists speculated that this could spell the end of Tahnoon’s AI dreams. “Why did we ever think datacentres in the Gulf were a good idea?” ran one headline in the Financial Times.

Over the following months, Tahnoon shuttled around the Middle East, conducting covert diplomacy. According to Reuters, senior officials from Iran’s revolutionary guards were hosted by Tahnoon in his Abu Dhabi guesthouse. By mid-June, he had reportedly struck an agreement that provided billions of dollars for the Iranian government, and brought Iran’s strikes on the UAE to a halt. A few weeks later, on the same day that Trump announced that the US’s ceasefire with Iran was “over”, the US commerce department quietly confirmed that it was removing the last remaining export controls restricting the sale of advanced AI chips to Abu Dhabi.

As life in Abu Dhabi gradually returned to something resembling normality, Tahnoon’s family members began reappearing in public. A company founded by his daughter, Sheikha Fatima bint Tahnoon, signed a memorandum of understanding with G42 last month, suggesting that she is being primed to follow in his footsteps and eventually assume a commanding role within the UAE’s tech-security empire. Tahnoon’s son, Sheikh Zayed bin Tahnoon, was the guest of honour at several major jiu-jitsu events this summer. Tahnoon himself, meanwhile, stayed far from the public eye. Judging when to retreat, and knowing when to strike: “Ben” had outmanoeuvred his doubters once again.

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President Trump said Tuesday that he will name his artificial intelligence czar within the next few days.

Speaking at the White House alongside artificial intelligence executives, Mr. Trump said he expected to announce his pick within the next “three-to-four days.”

Mr. Trump said he wanted to seek opinions from AI companies, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, South Dakota Republican, before selecting a candidate.

“We will have somebody extraordinary,” he told reporters.

Candidates who have been floated for the position include Sriram Krishan, the senior White House policy advisor on AI; Sean Cairncross, the administration’s national cyber director, and Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was said to be among the potential candidates, but Mr. Trump said last week that he eliminated him from consideration because he wanted him to stay at the Treasury.

Industry insiders and some lawmakers have called for limits on the technology because of concerns that machines could go rogue or fall into the wrong hands and cause widespread harm. Mr. Trump dismissed such claims, saying the guardrails need to be relaxed to keep America competitive.

Earlier Tuesday, he hosted a lunch with artificial intelligence executives. Mr. Trump now refers to the technology as “super intelligence.”

Mr. Trump said earlier this month that whoever gets the position will likely lead a new “AI Force.” The president said it would be similar to the Space Force, which he established during his first term, but he did not disclose whether it would be a new branch of the military or how it would work.

David Sacks, a venture capitalist, previously served as Mr. Trump’s AI and crypto czar, but left the White House earlier this year once his term as a special government employee expired.

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Production: By Europod, in co-production with Sphera Network.

EUobserver is proud to have an editorial partnership with Europod to co-publish the podcast series “Briefed” hosted by Léa Marchal. The podcast is available on all major platforms.

Find the full transcript below: 

Donald Trump is betting on voluntary commitments from AI companies. On Tuesday (29 September), he unveiled a self-regulatory agreement drawn up with some of the biggest names in the AI industry.

What does it mean, and how does it differ from the EU’s Code of Practice for general-purpose AI?

On Tuesday, September 29, Trump brought together the CEOs of some of the biggest AI companies. Together, they signed what could be described as a self-regulation pact: a short list of non-binding commitments called the White House Accord on Super Intelligence.

That’s the other novelty: Trump no longer wants to talk about artificial intelligence, but about “super intelligence”. The term AI apparently has negative connotations.

So, what exactly have these companies committed to? The CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, SpaceX and Nvidia have pledged to put safeguards in place, quickly detect and fix problems, and have their systems checked by independent auditors.

The principle of voluntary commitments may sound familiar to Europeans: They echo the EU’s Code of Practice for general-purpose AI — which, like the White House agreement, is not legally binding.

So what’s the difference? First of all, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have also signed the EU code, while Meta, SpaceX and Nvidia have not.

And, more importantly, the EU does have binding rules in place: the AI Act, which is already in force. As part of this regulation, the European Commission developed the Code of Practice to help companies comply with the rules.

You could think of it as a checklist for AI companies, to help them make sure they are complying with the law.

Another difference is the sheer volume of recommendations. The document published by Trump is just one page long. The European Code of Practice runs to more than 60 pages and was prepared with the help of dozens of independent experts.

It is also more comprehensive, covering not only safety, but also transparency and copyright. But this raises another question: if both documents are voluntary,  how effective can they actually be?

When the European Code of Practice was published, some civil society organisations criticised it, arguing that voluntary commitments are not enough and that concrete obligations are needed.

There are binding obligations under the AI Act. But they are not as precise as what is in the code of conduct.

Similar criticisms have emerged since the White House agreement was published on Tuesday. And it is worse in the US case, since companies are absolutely not legally bound by the commitments they have made.

The United States has generally been less inclined towards binding regulation of the sector. Trump has argued that rules can hinder the development of companies, and has promoted a national framework that is as minimally restrictive as possible.

The White House document does leave the door open to legislation in the future. It says that, over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into lows or regulations.

But for now, they remain voluntary commitments. If you are interested in this topic, there will be a live event on Tuesday next week about AI and its safeguards, organised by VoxEurope.

 It will be online and you can find all information on Vox Europe website. 

It was the first face-to-face between the two men vying to govern California, the most populous state in the United States, with more than 39 million residents, just over a month before the midterm elections. Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Xavier Becerra arrived at the CNN-organized debate with a twofold mission: lay out their proposals to lead what is considered the fourth-largest economy in the world and, at the same time, attack their opponent and explain to voters why they should not trust the other with their vote on November 3. Neither missed the chance to present their ideas on the state’s difficult economic situation, fears around artificial intelligence, and the ICE raids that threaten undocumented immigrants.

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It was 8.22 a.m. on Wednesday when, aboard Flydubai flight FZ1073 between Dubai and Tel Aviv, the aircraft suddenly lost altitude, began jerking violently and a woman in the front started screaming. “They’re killing him, they’re killing him!” Many of the 174 passengers wondered what had provoked that hysterical outburst, since it initially seemed to be nothing more than severe turbulence.

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Google has asked the European Union’s General Court to suspend an order requiring it to make search data available to competing search engines and artificial-intelligence services while its wider legal challenge proceeds.

The application for interim measures follows Google’s challenge to a European Commission decision adopted in July under the Digital Markets Act. The company argues that implementation before the court rules on the main case could cause serious harm to the privacy of European users.

The Commission maintains that its requirements already contain safeguards for privacy, security and personal data.

At the centre of the dispute is Article 6(11) of the Digital Markets Act, which requires Google to give eligible rival search services access to anonymised ranking, query, click and viewing data on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.

The Commission opened specification proceedings in January and adopted binding measures on 16 July.

The rules explicitly allow AI chatbots offering search functions to qualify for access.

Brussels argues that Google has accumulated a quantity of search information which competitors cannot readily reproduce. User queries and interactions can improve search algorithms, reinforcing the position of an established provider and creating a substantial entry barrier for newcomers.

EU Today examined the issue in April, when the Commission first set out its proposed Google search-data sharing measures.

The final July decision turned those proposals into binding requirements.

The inclusion of AI services gives the case wider significance. Generative AI products increasingly answer questions directly rather than sending users through a conventional list of search results. That is putting AI developers and traditional search engines into increasingly direct competition.

The Commission’s data-access framework is intended to reduce the advantage obtained from data accumulated by designated gatekeepers and make it easier for competing services to enter the market.

Access will not be unrestricted.

Applicants must operate a genuine online search service in the EU and satisfy eligibility requirements. Established applicants generally need at least 50,000 average monthly EU users during the previous year, while newer companies can qualify under investment criteria.

They must also comply with security and data-protection requirements and undergo independent auditing. The Commission can exclude applicants presenting public-security risks, while the data must be processed within the European Economic Area or under arrangements providing equivalent protection.

Google argues that these safeguards do not remove the underlying privacy risk.

The company has therefore asked the General Court for an interim suspension while judges consider the legality of the Commission’s decision.

The case adds another front to an increasingly difficult relationship between Google and Brussels.

In July, the Commission imposed two Digital Markets Act fines on Google totalling €890 million. As EU Today reported following the penalties, one case concerned Google’s treatment of its own services in search results while another dealt with restrictions preventing app developers from directing users towards alternative offers.

The dispute subsequently developed into a wider transatlantic issue when President Donald Trump threatened a Section 301 trade investigation in response to the EU penalties, a development examined by EU Today.

Google has meanwhile begun altering some of its European services in response to regulatory pressure. Earlier this month it changed the presentation of European search results, while warning that the new format could make searches less useful.

The present case is different because it deals with access to the underlying information generated by searches rather than only the way results are displayed.

The Commission wants qualifying competitors to obtain data that could help them improve their own services. Google says opening those datasets creates privacy and security risks which cannot simply be reversed if it eventually wins the court case.

That is why the interim application is important.

Google is not asking the court merely to overturn the Commission decision at the end of the litigation. It wants implementation halted before the full case is resolved.

Unless judges intervene, the Commission timetable continues.

The wider dispute will determine how far Brussels can require a dominant digital platform to share data accumulated through its own users in order to encourage competition — an issue that is becoming increasingly important as search and generative AI converge.

Six out of nine of the most popular AI chatbots routinely exposed user input to third parties, new European research reveals.

Multiple chatbots disclosed sensitive user data to advertising companies through trackers – a piece of code used to identify and target users on the web with customised advertisements, which are widely used across the web.

And tech companies may have been able to link conversation summaries with personal identifiers, allowing users to be targeted based on their conversations with AI.

The researchers aimed to establish the connection between existing tracking technologies and AI advertising. “We basically connected the dots, and wanted to test whether and how AI bots integrate tracking and advertising services,” said Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, who led the study.

Vallina-Rodriguez is part of a group of researchers who investigated the use of ad trackers in the most popular AI providers with colleagues at Imdea Networks, a public research institute in Madrid.

Their findings warn of “tensions” between tech company practices and obligations to users under privacy laws.

Sensitive user-data shared 

“We already knew that tracking is pervasive, even without AI. But now you have the most super-invasive phenomena on the internet, which is AI,” said Itxaso Domínguez de Olazábal, a policy adviser at digital rights group Edri.

Users often share information about their health, psychological state, finances, and other intimate matters in AI prompts. The study shows how users who asked AI questions about such matters could have sensitive details summarised in a chat title shared with third parties. 

“Now, big tech has access to much more intimate information which users tell AI. It’s crazy, the details are so intimate. My friends ask AI bots about relationships, or they use ‘doctor AI’,” said Domínguez de Olazábal.

GDPR rules require companies to make clear how users’ data is harvested, but researchers question “ambiguous expressions” used to explain the role of trackers in T&Cs.

And the ePrivacy directive requires users to consent to cookies unless they are “strictly necessary”, but researchers found that even when users rejected non-essential cookies, AI bots Perplexity, DeepSeek, Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT and Claude still connected to Google Ads.

All of the top nine most popular chatbots were found to integrate at least one third-party advertising or tracking service.

Consent and transparency ‘shortcomings’

A preview of the study, released in May, prompted the Spanish privacy watchdog AEPD to request for the European Data Protection Committee (EPDC) to share preliminary findings with European counterparts “for knowledge and assessment”.

The final paper, titled ‘Prompt like a Butterfly, Sting like a Tracker’, has been accepted for publication at an academic forum in Delft next year.

Findings “highlight tensions between current practices and obligations under the GDPR and ePrivacy Directive, exposing broader shortcomings in consent, access control, and transparency mechanisms,” the paper reads.

It reveals that Grok, operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI, exposed public links to conversations by default, allowing trackers to routinely access whole conversations, with TikTok also processing screenshots of Grok conversations.

Meanwhile, Mistral, France’s flagship AI firm, did not offer users a choice to reject non-essential cookies. 

But offering such a choice might soon be redundant anyway. “The tracking industry is moving towards paradigms called cookie-less and identity-based tracking. So they are circumventing anti-tracking capabilities,” Vallina-Rodriguez told EUobserver.

One way, or another …

Some suggest that using browsers with anti-tracker technologies can help users avoid surveillance.

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