Hugin & Munin Journal

GDPR may be Europe’s most recognisable regulatory export, and one of its most irritating inventions. It changed how companies describe personal data, forced organisations to justify what they collect and gave legal force to the idea that information about people is not free industrial residue. It also became associated with the cookie banner: the repetitive interruption that asks for a choice few people understand and many interfaces are designed to steer. That association is only partly fair. Most cookie-consent banners arise from the interaction between EU rules governing tracking cookies and GDPR standards for valid consent. Strictly necessary cookies do not require consent, and GDPR permits several legal bases for processing besides consent. Even so, the banner captures a real failure of implementation. A system intended to give people control often reaches them as paperwork, while the organisations processing their data acquire another record showing that a box was clicked. A...

On 12 June 2026, the US government ordered Anthropic to suspend foreign-national access to its two newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5 . Because Anthropic could not verify every user’s nationality in real time, it disabled both models for everyone. The European Commission said it was assessing the implications and practical consequences for European users; previously scheduled Commission and ENISA meetings with Anthropic continued. The blanket shutdown did not last. The broad export controls were lifted on 30 June, Fable 5 returned globally on 1 July, and access to Mythos 5 initially resumed only for a set of approved US organisations while Anthropic coordinated with the US government over broader domestic and international access. By September, Fable 5.1 was generally available while Mythos 5.1 remained restricted to vetted access and, for the model itself, to a set of US organisations . The episode was temporary, but that does not make it trivial. It established that access to an i...

The European Union’s competitiveness crisis is not a story of collapse. That is almost the problem. Collapse would be visible and politically clarifying. Europe faces something easier to accommodate: a long period in which daily life remains safe, prosperous and culturally rich while the continent loses control over more of the systems that determine its choices. Cloud infrastructure, advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence, batteries, drones, space systems, payment networks and defence technology are not simply profitable industries. They are layers of practical sovereignty. A society that depends on others for them can still regulate, tax, educate and consume. It has less freedom, however, when suppliers, allies or platform owners change their priorities. Europe’s danger is not poverty. It is reduced agency concealed by continued comfort. Europe’s danger is not collapse, but dependency hidden beneath comfort. Editorial image generated by the author. The ...