Brussels knifes privacy to feed the AI boom (www.politico.eu)

EU officials are preparing a “digital omnibus” package that would rewrite parts of the bloc’s tech rulebook — including targeted amendments to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — to cut red tape and accelerate AI development in Europe. The European Commission says the changes will be measured, but draft documents obtained by POLITICO show proposals that would materially ease constraints for companies building and training AI systems, trading some long-held privacy protections for faster commercial deployment. For the AI/ML community this signals both opportunity and risk: developers and startups could gain broader lawful bases for processing personal data, expanded reuse of datasets for model training, and relaxed consent or data-minimization obligations that currently slow experimentation and scaling. That could boost European competitiveness and lower compliance costs, but also raises technical and ethical implications — higher privacy leakage risk, weaker accountability for biased or harmful outputs, and increased cross-border data flows. The move reframes policy as a pro-growth lever for AI, forcing practitioners, privacy advocates and regulators to reconcile innovation incentives with robust safeguards.