Science, technology, space, defense. Tweets are my own
Washington DC | London
Joined January 2012
- Tweets10.1K
- Following882
- Followers974
- Likes2.1K
Anika Torruella retweeted
Broadcast networks ABC and NBC said they would not interrupt regular programming to carry President Trump’s prime-time speech live. wapo.st/3R2Dk5X
Anika Torruella retweeted
Today the EU made American AI illegal in 27 countries.
The reason is ONE sentence Microsoft's own lawyer said under oath:
This morning in Brussels, EU Tech Chief Henna Virkkunen unveiled the Cloud and AI Development Act. It's the most aggressive anti-American tech move from Europe since GDPR.
The law forces EU public sector procurement in banking, healthcare, defense, and energy to apply mandatory non-price factors favoring software and hardware built inside the EU. Microsoft Azure can be cheaper, AWS can be faster, Google Cloud can have the better model, and EU governments MUST legally prefer European alternatives.
AWS, Microsoft, and Google currently control roughly 70% of the European cloud market. Brussels is now openly targeting greater independence from US providers in cloud, AI, and semiconductors.
The largest regulatory market-share transfer in tech history is being written into law right now.
But the real story is how this happened...
On June 10, 2025, a man almost no one outside Brussels had heard of walked into the French Senate. His name is Anton Carniaux, Director of Public and Legal Affairs at Microsoft France.
Senator Dany Wattebled asked him under oath whether he could guarantee that data belonging to French citizens, stored on Microsoft European servers, would never be transmitted to US authorities without explicit consent from the French government.
Carniaux answered honestly. He admitted he could not guarantee it, because Microsoft must comply with the US CLOUD Act regardless of where European data physically sits. One sentence of sworn testimony from Microsoft's own counsel killed every sovereign cloud defense Big Tech had spent five years building.
It became the legal foundation for the law unveiled today.
Then Trump accelerated the divorce.
January 2025 brought executive orders expanding US surveillance authorities. Vance went to Munich and attacked European democracies on stage.
The tariffs followed and so did the Pentagon's $200 million AI contract war that ended with OpenAI replacing Anthropic after Hegseth labeled it a supply chain risk. So did OpenAI's Stargate and yesterday's Trump AI Executive Order, whose Section 3 lets the White House pick which AI companies get 30-day early access to frontier models. American AI was officially declared a US government strategic asset.
Europe heard every word of it.
On May 12, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch told the French National Assembly that Europe had 24 months to build sovereign AI infrastructure or become a permanent US VASSAL state.
And the response came fast:
April 24: Cohere acquired Germany's Aleph Alpha for $20 billion with both Germany's and Canada's digital ministers in the room at the Berlin announcement. May 30: SoftBank committed up to $87 BILLION for French nuclear-powered data centers, the largest AI infrastructure project in European history.
Yesterday: EU Parliament announced it's dropping Google for French search engine Qwant tomorrow. France ordered every government workstation off Windows and onto Linux.
Today the Cloud and AI Development Act made all of it law.
- Mistral is building a 1.4 gigawatt AI campus near Paris by 2028 with Nvidia, MGX, and Bpifrance
- SAP's EU AI Cloud, launched last November, runs on Cohere, Mistral, and SAP's own sovereign infrastructure
- McKinsey forecasts $600 billion in sovereign AI needs by 2030
None of that money is going to Silicon Valley.
The America First AI policy built a wall around the world's most regulated economy, and American companies are on the wrong side of it.
Microsoft's lawyer told the truth in a Senate hearing nobody watched. Trump turned that admission into a national security narrative while the EU turned that narrative into procurement law.
And one entire continent walked away from the American tech stack...
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The Cloud and AI Development Act is a legislative proposal—not law—that introduces sovereignty assessments and procurement preferences favoring EU providers but does not ban American AI or cloud services. digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/cl… ec.europa.eu/commission/pre…
Anika Torruella retweeted
This Google insider just revealed what AI is actually being used for behind closed doors.
It has nothing to do with chatbots.
Mo Gawdat was a senior executive at Google for over a decade. He watched AI get built from the inside. He was in the rooms, in the labs, in the government meetings in China that almost no Western executive was allowed into.
And he just went on Diary of a CEO and said things that no active tech executive would ever be allowed to say publicly:
"What the general public sees about AI is overhyped but ineffective. What the real geeks see inside the lab is genuinely world-changing."
The public gets chatbots and AI-generated videos while the labs are building autonomous weapons systems, military targeting technology, real-time surveillance infrastructure, and self-improving code that rewrites itself every microsecond without human oversight.
As Mo put it: "As we speak, we are living in two major wars where AI is doing most of the killing."
He talked about Palantir's CEO Alex Karp openly celebrating how his targeting technology identifies and eliminates people. He talked about the next generation of autonomous weapons costing $20,000 each, meaning any government with a $50 billion defense budget can literally rain drones on every corner of the planet.
And as you remember, Anthropic was offered a $500 million military contract to allow their AI to be used for human targeting and surveillance. They refused and walked away from the money.
OpenAI took the contract the following week.
Mo's response: "You have to start observing who is actually behaving in a way that makes AI work for humanity, and who is behaving in a way that makes AI work for their share price."
Now this is where it gets really interesting...
In Mo's documentary Chasing Utopia, Altman literally says directly on camera: "I suspect that AI is likely going to end humanity, but we're going to create a lot of interesting companies in the process."
That is the CEO of the most powerful AI company on Earth saying that he suspects his OWN technology will end the human race and then shrugging it off because the business opportunity is too good to pass up.
Mo's prediction for the next decade:
War, economic collapse, mass unemployment, surveillance expansion, and an absolute concentration of power at the top unlike anything in modern history.
His prediction after that is if humanity survives the next 10 years, AI will eventually create a world of abundance where intelligence solves every problem we currently face.
But the path between here and there is what terrifies him.
And the men building the technology know exactly what they're doing.
Do you think he's just exaggerating for attention, or is there truth in this?
Anika Torruella retweeted
Two economists just published a mathematical proof that AI will destroy the economy.
Not might. Not could. Will — if nothing changes.
The paper is called "The AI Layoff Trap." Published March 2, 2026. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Boston University. Peer reviewed. Mathematically modeled.
The conclusion is one sentence.
"At the limit, firms automate their way to boundless productivity and zero demand."
An economy that produces everything. And sells it to nobody.
Here is how you get there.
A company fires 500 workers and replaces them with AI. A competitor fires 700 to keep up. Another fires 1,000. Every company is behaving rationally. Every company is following the incentives correctly. And every company is building a trap for itself.
Because the workers who were fired were also customers.
When they lose their jobs faster than the economy can absorb them, they stop spending. Consumer demand falls. Companies respond by cutting costs — which means automating more workers — which means less spending — which means more falling demand — which means more automation.
The loop has no natural exit.
The researchers tested every proposed solution. Universal basic income. Capital income taxes. Worker equity participation. Upskilling programs. Corporate coordination agreements.
Every single one failed in the model.
The only intervention that worked: a Pigouvian automation tax — a per-task levy charged every time a company replaces a human with AI, forcing them to price in the demand they are destroying before they pull the trigger.
No government has implemented this. No major economy is seriously discussing it.
Meanwhile the numbers are already tracking the curve. 100,000 tech workers laid off in 2025. 92,000 more in the first months of 2026. Jack Dorsey fired half of Block's workforce and said publicly: "Within the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion."
Nobody is doing anything wrong. Companies are following their incentives perfectly. That is exactly the problem.
Rational behavior. At scale. Simultaneously. With no mechanism to stop it.
Two economists built the math. The math leads to one place.
Source: Falk & Tsoukalas · Wharton School + Boston University ·
Anika Torruella retweeted
Everyone should read what Senior Vice President of Exxon Neil Chapman says about the oil price surge coming in 2-3 weeks
The next wave of the energy shock is approaching fast
Anika Torruella retweeted
BREAKING: A Russian attack drone has struck a residential building in Galați, Romania, according to reports from the scene.
Romania is a NATO member state. Initial reports indicate multiple people were injured, including several with serious injuries, after the Russian one-way attack drone impacted the building in eastern Romania overnight.
Anika Torruella retweeted
‼️🇺🇸🇨🇺 U.S. intelligence believes Cuba has acquired more than 300 military drones from Russia and Iran.
According to a new report, Cuban officials have discussed potential strikes on the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, American warships, and even Key West, Florida, just 90 miles from Cuban shores.
Source: Axios
Anika Torruella retweeted
According to Axios, citing classified intelligence products shared with the news outlet, Cuba has acquired 300 drones from Russia and Iran since 2023 and has concept operations (CONOP) on the books where they would be used to target U.S. installations and vessels at Key West and Guantanamo Bay.
Per the report “officials don't believe Cuba is an imminent threat, or actively planning to attack American interests. But U.S intelligence indicates the island's military officials have been discussing drone warfare plans in case hostilities erupt as relations with the U.S. continue to deteriorate.”
Anika Torruella retweeted
Iran is using the existence of an unknown number of naval mines it laid in the Strait of Hormuz to force ships to use Iranian territorial waters to traverse the Strait, which enables Iran to shakedown these ships for fees while the ships are in Iranian territorial waters. Iran likely designed its threatening behavior and its shakedowns to disrupt the global economy, which Iran calculates will enable it to extract concessions from the United States.
Iran warned merchant ships that mines could exist in a “hazardous area” that covers 1,394 sq km of the Strait, including the normal traffic separation scheme (shipping lanes) that ships use to transit the Strait. Ships seeking to avoid the Iranian-declared hazardous area must transit Iranian territorial waters.
Iran then shakes down these merchant ships by extracting “protection fees.” These “protection” fees protect ships from Iranian attacks. This protection racket is illegal under maritime law. No state bordering a strait is permitted to restrict traffic or extract fees under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Unspecified US officials told the New York Times on April 11 that Iran laid its mines—of which there are reportedly fewer than a dozen, according to a previous March 23 report—” haphazardly,” which has prevented Iran from locating or removing them. These mines may or may not be in the 1,394 sq km “hazardous area.”
The threat of mines also enables Iran to keep the price of oil and shipping insurance as high as possible for as long as possible without conducting attacks that would cause the ceasefire to collapse. Iran may calculate that the high price of oil and shipping insurance would cause the United States to cave on some of Iran’s demands.
The United States is attempting to undermine Iran’s ability to use the threat of mines in the “hazardous area” by using US Navy destroyers to prove that the normal traffic separation scheme is safe and viable for traffic. Iran can only use the threat of mines to keep these costs high if the fear of mines persists. US President Donald Trump said on April 11 that the United States is “starting the process of clearing out” the strait.
Arleigh Burke-Class destroyers USS Frank E. Peterson and USS Michael Murphy transited the Strait to clear the Strait of naval mines. US CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper said that the US Navy will share the route of safe passage with civilian shipping as soon as possible. Such a move would undermine Iran’s threats and badly damage its leverage in negotiations. The Qatari Transport Ministry announced later on April 11 that it will resume operations ”for all types of maritime vessels and ships” between 6:00 AM and 6:00 PM local time on April 12.
NEW: Iran and the United States have fundamentally different interpretations of the ongoing negotiations, which will generate friction. Iran seeks an all-encompassing agreement that will end the threat of war with the United States, while the United States seeks a much narrower agreement centered on the current war. The US delegation, led by US Vice President JD Vance and including US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, appears to be pursuing a narrow, issue-specific negotiation focused on de-escalatory mechanisms around the Strait of Hormuz, and reportedly secondary matters like detainees.
Iran is using the existence of an unknown number of naval mines it laid in the Strait of Hormuz to force ships to use Iranian territorial waters to traverse the Strait, which enables Iran to shakedown these ships for fees while the ships are in Iranian territorial waters. This protection racket is illegal under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Iran likely designed its threatening behavior and its shakedowns to disrupt the global economy, which Iran calculates will enable it to extract concessions from the United States. Iran warned merchant ships that mines could exist in a “hazardous area” that covers 1,394 sq km of the Strait, including the normal traffic separation scheme (shipping lanes) that ships use to transit the Strait.
The current ceasefire will provide Iran an opportunity to reorganize its missile force and recover from the temporary disruption wrought to the missile force during constant US and Israeli operations. Consistent US and Israeli operations over Iran had suppressed Iran’s missile force by preventing Iran from digging out launchers, disrupting command-and-control, and creating pervasive fear in military units that made them unwilling or unable to conduct attacks, as ISW-CTP has previously assessed.
Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei continues to recover from severe facial and leg injuries that he sustained in the February 28 strike on the supreme leader’s compound in Tehran Province. Three unspecified individuals close to Mojtaba’s inner circle told Reuters on April 11 that the strike disfigured Mojtaba’s face and injured one or both of his legs.
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) may be helping Iran to reconstitute some of its degraded air defense capabilities during the current ceasefire. The PRC is preparing to deliver man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS) to Iran within the coming weeks, according to three sources familiar with recent US intelligence assessments.
Anika Torruella retweeted
SOMEONE BUILT A MAP THAT SHOWS EXACTLY WHERE EVERY POWER PLANT, TRANSMISSION LINE, SUBSTATION & DATA CENTER SITS ON THE US GRID
all on one interactive map. all free
you can see how the grid is laid out... where the datacenters cluster... which transmission corridors carry the load... where the high-capacity connection points are
opengridworks.com/power-plan…
zoom into any region and the whole picture comes into focus why energy costs what it costs, why data centers go where they go, why some states are power exporters and others aren't
this is the kind of infrastructure visibility that used to require expensive industry reports
now it's one tab
Anika Torruella retweeted
🇺🇸🇮🇷 Trump says the blockade on Iran is total. At least 34 Iranian tankers that just reached India would disagree.
Here's the loophole: Iran loads its oil and hugs its own coastline toward Pakistan, never entering international waters where the U.S. can intercept.
From there, ships pass through Pakistan and India's coastal waters using something called "innocent passage," a right guaranteed under international law that coastal states can't block.
Washington has zero authority once they're in those corridors.
On paper, there's a blockade, but in reality, the sea is full of loopholes and Iran has a map.
Source: Wall Street Research Center YT
🚨 BREAKING:
🇺🇸🇮🇷 Trump is expected to hold a Situation Room meeting today on Iran with his full national security and foreign policy team.
The agenda: the current negotiation freeze and what comes next.
Source: @BarakRavid
Anika Torruella retweeted
Here is the list of NASA science missions that the Trump administration proposes to terminate.
Note that it includes many missions that are already in space, fully operational.
This is a wrecking operation against America.
Anika Torruella retweeted
Mostly accurate, but “clearing” needs context. The ships crossed the strait — east to west and back — as a freedom of navigation operation. No mines were cleared. Trump’s language implies active mine-clearance; what actually happened was a transit designed to signal that the U.S. won’t ask Iranian permission to use international waters.
Iran called it a ceasefire violation and threatened to attack the ships. That part didn’t make your post.
The talks in Islamabad are still ongoing. So the U.S. sailed through Iran’s declared exclusion zone while its negotiators were sitting across the table from Iranian delegates in Pakistan. That’s the real story.
Anika Torruella retweeted
Trump an hour ago:
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want it to happen but it probably will.”
JD Vance right now:
"Iran has to know we've got tools in our toolkit that we so far haven't decided to use. Trump can decide to use them, and he will if the Iranians don't change course."
The President and the Vice President are both threatening to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran. This is the most dangerous moment in human history and it is all being caused by the United States and Israel.
Anika Torruella retweeted
🇷🇺🇨🇺 The Russian oil tanker "Anatoly Kolodkin" carrying ~730,000 barrels of crude has entered Cuba's Exclusive Economic Zone.
The vessel went through the US Naval blockade as agreed between Moscow and Washington.
This is the country's first major oil delivery in over 3 months.
Anika Torruella retweeted
NEW: Four sanctioned Russian Shadow Fleet vessels are currently loitering over undersea cables and pipelines just outside UK waters.
Three of the vessels recently diverted routes away from the Channel after the government announced new powers to seize Moscow's suspect tankers.
One, Indri, has been circling over a key undersea cable connecting Ireland and Iceland, while three tankers - Deneb, Tiburon, and Aktros - are loitering above a network of gas and oil pipelines in the North Sea.
After the UK’s action against Russia’s Shadow Fleet seemed to initially deter them from passing through UK waters, Vladimir Putin’s ships are starting to test the Prime Minister’s words.
inews.co.uk/news/putins-shad…
Anika Torruella retweeted
🚨 BREAKING | An Iranian official told Drop Site News that a U.S. F-15 warplane struck by Iranian forces went down over southern Tehran Province, with intense fire reported at the crash site.
The official said the nature of the strike prevented the pilot[s] from ejecting before the aircraft crashed. No remains have been found.
📸 Photos of the wreckage were published by Iran’s state-affiliated Fars News Agency.
