EU governments are removing Chat Control from today's COREPER agenda (digitalcourage.social)

EU governments have pulled the controversial “Chat Control” item from today’s COREPER agenda because no qualified majority has been reached, according to a leaked diplomatic protocol. The leak — which highlights diverging national positions and a specific push from Spain — shows member states are still negotiating the design and legal framing of measures that would require providers to detect and report illicit content in private communications. Removing the file from COREPER (the committee of member-state ambassadors that prepares Council decisions) delays any Council-level decision and signals substantial political disagreement behind the scenes. For the AI/ML community this pause matters: the eventual outcome will determine whether and how automated detection systems are legally mandated for end‑to‑end encrypted services, whether scanning will be voluntary or compulsory, and which technical architectures (server‑side scanning, client‑side/pre‑upload models, or metadata analysis) are acceptable. That influences model design, accuracy requirements, benchmarking for false positives/negatives, dataset access and retention rules, and liability for providers. Continued negotiation leaves developers and vendors with regulatory uncertainty about compliance costs, privacy trade‑offs, and potential limits on encryption — and it increases the chance that any future rule will shape standards for automated content detection across the EU.