At the first Artificial Intelligence Summit, the European Union is examining ways to catch up with America and China

European Union leaders will meet in Dublin, today (Friday), for their first ever summit on artificial intelligence, to discuss how the bloc can catch up with the United States and China, and address financing and other problems, according to a Reuters report.

This summit comes amid growing concerns about a technology that could cause a major transformation in the shape of industries and societies, but it has raised concern in the past few months after a series of incidents that occurred due to out-of-control artificial intelligence systems. This week witnessed more turmoil with the resignation of Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia; This deprived this sector of one of its most prominent pioneers.

Leaders in Dublin will evaluate ways to overcome other problems, such as red tape and putting in place preventative controls.

European Council President Antonio Costa wrote in an invitation letter addressed to European Union leaders last week: “In light of the rapid pace of development of artificial intelligence. “I believe that there is now a need to hold the first discussion focusing on this file at the leadership level about the opportunities provided by artificial intelligence, as well as about its impact, which is causing a major transformation in our economies and societies.”

Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral AI, and Nobel Prize-winning artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton are scheduled to participate to brief European Union leaders on the latest developments.

Europe is intensifying its efforts to be a prominent player in the field of artificial intelligence. An initiative known as the “Chip Act,” implemented three years ago, appears to fall short of its goal of attracting advanced manufacturing and doubling the EU’s share of the global chip market to 20 percent by 2030.

A plan to build seven giant artificial intelligence factories that include under one roof advanced artificial intelligence processors, software, cloud technology, high-speed connectivity, and data centers has not yet been fully launched, due to disagreement among European Union countries over spending on competitiveness in the Union’s budget for the period 2028-2034.

In addition to artificial intelligence, the leaders are also scheduled to discuss the Ukraine file, which was added to the agenda, a day after American envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Dublin to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, following talks they held with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

A high-ranking European Union official stated that the Union's leaders are likely to discuss their participation in negotiations to end the war, and the potential security guarantees that the Union can provide in the event of a ceasefire.

The disruption of Microsoft services, such as Outlook, Teams, and CoPilot, extended to working hours in the Asia-Pacific region, today, Friday, after affecting thousands of users in the United States, while the technology giant faced difficulties in fixing server problems that it blamed for the outage.

The outage affected government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States, as well as companies including OpenAI and Anthropic. This is the second outage for Microsoft 365 services this year, raising concerns that recurring outages will lead business customers to question Microsoft's reliability.

Partial improvement in Microsoft services

Microsoft said in its latest statement that it had made modifications to the affected servers, but this step did not succeed in returning the service to normal in a stable manner. It indicated partial improvement in the areas where these amendments were implemented.

The company said on the “X” platform: “We are reviewing additional measures that we can take to improve the stability of the infrastructure in general.”

DownDetector, which tracks outages by compiling status reports from a number of sources, reported more than 18,000 reports of issues with Outlook in the United States at 11:30 p.m. EST (0430 GMT). It also observed outages in a number of Microsoft services in the Asia-Pacific region, including India, Australia, and Japan, early today, Friday, local time.

At the height of the holiday, Down Detector detected more than 130,000 reports of problems with Outlook in the United States at around 1 p.m. EST, Thursday. The malfunction lasted for about 12 hours.

Microsoft said in a notice about the service status that features of Microsoft 365 services that rely on Online Exchange and email were affected, while elements that do not depend on Online Exchange remained functional. Exchange Online is the company's cloud messaging platform, which provides email, calendar, contacts and tasks services.

The company added that it “does not have any information” indicating that the malfunction was the result of malicious electronic activity or a cyber attack.

Australian Home Affairs and Cyber ​​Security Minister Tony Burke said that Microsoft does not believe it is dealing with a cyber attack.

“They believe they are dealing, in some ways, with something similar to what we saw with CrowdStrike, where a software update led to a glitch,” Burke explained in a press conference.

“The impact they are dealing with... is largely focused on email systems,” he added.

The holidays extend to government agencies, airlines, and artificial intelligence

The Australian Intelligence Agency and the Federal Police were among those affected by this outage on Friday.

The 2024 Crowd Strike outage was one of the largest Internet disruptions, crippling technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, highlighting the fragility of interconnected technologies around the world.

The US House of Representatives indicated that the malfunction affected its users, and that its engineers were working with Microsoft.

Japanese Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki told reporters that the malfunction affects the infrastructure of government information systems.

The two American artificial intelligence companies, “Open AI” and “Anthropic,” said that they encountered problems with Microsoft’s connectivity services, while the Indian airlines, “IndiGo” and “Acasa Air,” said that their email support services were affected.

Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at the eToro trading platform, pointed out that investors are likely to overcome the impact of the outage, but repeated outages may harm Microsoft in the long term.

Microsoft faced a disruption in its 365 services last January, as well as in October of last year.

Last month, Microsoft reported a malfunction in its cloud platform (Azure), affecting its productivity software package and a group of industries around the world.

A group of non-profit organizations filed a lawsuit today, Thursday, against the companies “OpenAI”, “Anthropic”, “MetaPlatforms”, “Google” and the artificial intelligence division of “SpaceX”, seeking to stop the development of the most advanced artificial intelligence models, based on concerns expressed by the leaders of these companies themselves that this technology poses a threat to humanity.

These organizations, which focus on accountability in technology, filed the lawsuit in San Francisco. She said that California's laws against unfair business practices provide the basis for issuing an injunction preventing companies from continuing to develop products, such as “ChatGPT,” “Gemini,” and “Cloud.”

In the lawsuit, the organizations cite statements by leaders, such as Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, and Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, about the ability of artificial intelligence to destroy civilizations. The lawsuit also refers to recent incidents in which models went out of testing environments and automatically attacked government websites.

The text of the lawsuit stated, according to Reuters: “No other sector is allowed to consider the development of unsafe products, let alone those that could kill us all, as inevitable... Nor is any sector given the right to regulate on its own the development of such dangerous products.”

In the lawsuit, the organizations accuse the companies of engaging in business practices that cause public harm or harm public health and the well-being of society, pointing to past incidents that have already occurred and the possibility of future harm.

A Meta company spokesman declined to comment. Representatives of the other companies did not respond to requests for comment.

Other lawsuits

US President Donald Trump's administration has so far refused to seek widespread regulation of artificial intelligence, fearing that this would harm the United States' ability to compete with China, but states and private entities have sought to use lawsuits to force companies to make changes.

Florida Attorney General James Othmeyer filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in June. He accused the company of misleading the public about the safety of its “GBT Chat” platform, and said it had harmed children by providing perpetrators of school shootings with information and guidance on self-harm, in addition to causing addiction among young users.

The state of Florida asked the judge hearing the case in September to prevent OpenAI from developing new artificial intelligence models without external oversight. That request is still pending, according to court records.

After the state filed the lawsuit, Drew Pusateri, a spokesman for OpenAI, said the company had temporarily stopped training its most efficient models and would not resume until additional safeguards were in place.

A group of eight states filed other lawsuits against OpenAI last month in various courts around the country. She said that GPT chat directed its users, including teenagers, to harm themselves or others. OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment after the lawsuits were filed.

Through their lawsuits, the states seek to impose financial penalties and issue an order preventing the company from developing self-developing artificial intelligence models unless it can ensure that those models are compatible with human values.