Denmark surprisingly abandons plans for Chat Control (www.heise.de)

Denmark’s EU Council Presidency has dropped its controversial “chat control” proposal that would have obliged communications providers to actively search users’ messages and files for child sexual abuse material, Danish Justice Minister Peter Hummelgard confirmed. The move—driven by lack of support from other member states and tensions within Denmark’s coalition (the Moderaterne distanced themselves from the idea)—means the presidency will instead pursue a compromise that keeps proactive scanning voluntary. A final attempt to reach agreement was possible in December, but Copenhagen opted to prioritize broader consensus over a push that risked collapsing negotiations; the existing voluntary regime for large platforms, extended once, still expires next spring. For the AI/ML community this is significant because mandated “chat control” would have forced widespread deployment of automated detection tech (hash matching, machine‑learning classifiers, client‑side scanning) at scale and raised acute trade‑offs around end‑to‑end encryption, false positives, privacy and surveillance. Abandoning the mandate reduces near‑term regulatory pressure to build intrusive client‑side or server‑side detectors, but the forthcoming Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) regulation—where Denmark now aims to enshrine voluntariness—still creates a regulatory backdrop that will shape how companies design detection pipelines, data retention, model explainability and risk mitigation strategies moving forward.