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  • Anti-green backlash hovers over COP climate talks

    Anti-green backlash hovers over COP climate talks

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    This article is part of the Road to COP special report, presented by SQM.

    LONDON — World leaders will touch down in Dubai next week for a climate change conference they’re billing yet again as the final off-ramp before catastrophe. But war, money squabbles and political headaches back home are already crowding the fate of the planet from the agenda.

    The breakdown of the Earth’s climate has for decades been the most important yet somehow least urgent of global crises, shoved to one side the moment politicians face a seemingly more acute problem. Even in 2023 — almost certainly the most scorching year in recorded history, with temperatures spawning catastrophic floods, wildfires and heat waves across the globe — the climate effort faces a bewildering array of distractions, headwinds and dismal prospects.

    “The plans to achieve net zero are increasingly under attack,” former U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May, who set her country’s goal of reaching climate neutrality into law, told POLITICO.

    The best outcome for the climate from the 13-day meeting, which is known as COP28 and opens Nov. 30, would be an unambiguous statement from almost 200 countries on how they intend to hasten their plans to cut fossil fuels, alongside new commitments from the richest nations on the planet to assist the poorest.

    But the odds against that happening are rising. Instead, the U.S. and its European allies are still struggling to cement a fragile deal with developing countries about an international climate-aid fund that had been hailed as the historic accomplishment of last year’s summit. Meanwhile, a populist backlash against the costs of green policies has governments across Europe pulling back — a reverse wave that would become an American-led tsunami if Donald Trump recaptures the White House next year.

    And across the developing world, the rise of energy and food prices stoked by the pandemic and the Ukraine war has caused inflation and debt to spiral, heightening the domestic pressure on climate-minded governments to spend their money on their most acute needs first.

    Even U.S. President Joe Biden, whose 2022 climate law kicked off a boom of clean-energy projects in the U.S., has endorsed fossil fuel drilling and pipeline projects under pressure to ease voter unease about rising fuel costs.

    Add to all that the newest Mideast war that began with Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7.

    On the upside, investment in much of the green economy is also surging. Analysts are cautiously opining that China’s emissions may have begun to decline, several years ahead of Beijing’s schedule. And the Paris-based International Energy Agency projects that global fossil fuel demand could peak this decade, with coal use plummeting and oil and gas plateauing afterward. Spurring these trends is a competition among powers such as China, the United States, India and the European Union to build out and dominate clean-energy industries.

    But the fossil fuel industry is betting against a global shift to green, instead investing its profits from the energy crisis into plans for long-term expansion of its core business.

    The air of gloom among many supporters of global climate action is hard to miss, as is the sense that global warming will not be the sole topic on leaders’ minds when they huddle in back rooms.

    “It’s getting away from us,” Tim Benton, director of the Chatham House environment and society center, said during a markedly downbeat discussion among climate experts at the think tank’s lodgings on St James’ Square in London earlier this month. “Where is the political space to drive the ambition that we need?”

    Fog of war

    The most acute distraction from global climate work is the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The conflagration is among many considerations the White House is weighing in Biden’s likely decision not to attend the summit, one senior administration official told POLITICO this month. Other leaders are also reconsidering their schedules, said one senior government official from a European country, who was granted anonymity to speak about the sensitive diplomacy of the conference.

    The war is also likely to push its way onto the climate summit’s unofficial agenda: Leaders of big Western powers who are attending will spend at least some of their diplomatically precious face-time with Middle East leaders discussing — not climate — but the regional security situation, said two people familiar with the planning for COP28 who could not be named for similar reasons. According to a preliminary list circulated by the United Arab Emirates, Israeli President Isaac Herzog or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will attend the talks.

    A threat even exists that the conference could be canceled or relocated, should a wider regional conflict develop, Benton said. 

    The UAE’s COP28 presidency isn’t talking about that, at least publicly. “We look forward to hosting a safe, inclusive COP beginning at the end of November,” said a spokesperson in an emailed statement. But the strained global relations have already thrown the location of next years’ COP29 talks into doubt because Russia has blocked any EU country from hosting the conference, which is due to be held in eastern or central Europe.

    The upshot is that the bubble of global cooperation that landed the Paris climate agreement in 2015 has burst. “We have a lot of more divisive narratives now,” Laurence Tubiana, the European Climate Foundation CEO who was one of the drafters of the Paris deal, said at the same meeting at Chatham House.

    The Ukraine war and tensions between the U.S. and China in particular have widened the gap between developed and developing countries, Benton told POLITICO in an email. 

    Now, “the Hamas-Israel war potentially creates significant new fault lines between the Arab world and many Western countries that are perceived to be more pro-Israeli,” he said. “The geopolitical tensions arising from the war could create leverage that enables petrostates (many of which are Muslim) to shore up the status quo.”

    Add to that the as yet unknown impact on already high fossil fuel commodity prices, said Kalee Kreider, president of the Ridgely Walsh public affairs consultancy and a former adviser to U.S. Vice President Al Gore. “Volatility doesn’t usually help raise ambition.”

    The Biden administration’s decisions to approve a tranche of new fossil fuel production and export projects will undermine U.S. diplomacy at COP28, said Ed Markey, a Democratic U.S. senator from Massachusetts.

    “You can’t preach temperance from a barstool, and the United States is running a long tab,” he said.

    U.N. climate talks veterans have seen this program before. “No year over the past three decades has been free of political, economic or health challenges,” said former U.N. climate chief Patricia Espinosa, who now heads the consulting firm onepoint5. “We simply can’t wait for the perfect conditions to address climate change. Time is a luxury we no longer have — if we ever did.”

    The EU backlash

    Before the Mideast’s newest shock to the global energy system, the war in Ukraine exposed Europe’s energy dependence on Russia — and initially galvanized the EU to accelerate efforts to roll out cleaner alternatives.

    But in the past year, persistent inflation has worn away that zeal. Businesses and citizens worry about anything that might add to the financial strain, and this has frayed a consensus on climate change that had held for the past four years among left, center and center right parties across much of the 27-country bloc.

    In recent months, conservative members of the European Parliament have attacked several EU green proposals as excessive, framing themselves as pragmatic environmentalists ahead of Europe-wide elections next year.  Reinvigorated far-right parties across the bloc are also using the green agenda to attack more mainstream parties, a trend that is spooking the center. 

    Germany’s government was almost brought down this year by a law that sought to ban gas boilers — with the Greens-led economy ministry retreating to a compromise. In France, President Emmanuel Macron has joined a growing chorus agitating for a “regulatory pause” on green legislation.

    If Europe’s struggles emerge at COP28, the ripple effect could be global, said Simone Tagliapietra, a senior fellow at the Brussels-based Bruegel think tank. 

    The “EU has established itself as the global laboratory for climate neutrality,” he said. “But now it needs to deliver on the experiment, or the world (which is closely watching) will assume this just does not work. And that would be a disaster for all of us.”

    U.K. retreats

    The world is also watching the former EU member that stakes a claim to be the climate leader of the G7: the U.K.

    London has prided itself on its green credentials ever since former Prime Minister May enacted a 2019 law calling for net zero by 2050 — making her the first leader of a major economy to do so.

    According to May’s successor Boris Johnson, net zero was good for the planet, good for voters, good for the economy. But under current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the messaging has transformed. Net zero remains the target — but it comes with a “burden” on working people.

    In a major speech this fall, Sunak rolled back plans to ban new petrol and diesel car sales by 2030, bringing the U.K. into line with the EU’s 2035 date. With half an eye on Germany’s travails, he said millions of households would be exempted from the gas boiler ban expected in 2035.

    In making his arguments for a “pragmatic” approach to net zero, Sunak frequently draws on the talking points of net zero-skeptics. Why should the citizens of the U.K., which within its own borders produces just 1 percent of global emissions, “sacrifice even more than others?” 

    The danger, said one EU climate diplomat — granted anonymity to discuss domestic policy of an allied country — was that other countries around the COP28 negotiating table would hear that kind of rhetoric from a capital that had led the world — and repurpose it to make their own excuses.

    Sunak’s predecessor May sees similar risks.

    “Nearly a third of all global emissions originate from countries with territorial emissions of 1 per cent or less,” May said. “If we all slammed on the brakes, it would make our net zero aspirations impossible to achieve.”

    Trump’s back

    The U.S., the largest producer of industrial carbon pollution in modern history, has been a weathervane on climate depending on who controls its governing branches.

    When Republicans regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022, it created a major drag on Biden’s promise to provide $11.4 billion in annual global climate finance by 2024.

    Securing this money and much more, developing countries say, is vital to any progress on global climate goals at COP28. Last year, on the back of the pandemic and the energy price spike, global debt soared to a record $92 trillion. This cripples developing countries’ ability to build clean energy and defend themselves against — or recover from — hurricanes, floods, droughts and fires.

    Even when the money is there, the politics can be challenging. Multibillion-dollar clean energy partnerships that the G7 has pursued to shift South Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam and India off coal power are struggling to gain acceptance from the recipients.

    Yet even more dire consequences await if Trump wins back the presidency next year. 

    A Trump victory would put the world’s largest economy a pen stroke away from quitting the Paris Agreement all over again — or, even more drastically, abandoning the entire international regime of climate pacts and summits. The thought is already sending a chill: Negotiations over a fund for poorer countries’ climate losses and damage, which Republicans oppose, include talks on how to make its language “change-of-government-proof” in light of a potential Trump victory, said Michai Robertson, lead finance negotiator for a bloc of island states.

    More concretely for reining in planet-heating gases, Trump would be in position to approve legislation eliminating all or part of the Inflation Reduction Act. Biden’s signature climate law included $370 billion in incentives for clean energy, electric vehicles and other carbon-cutting efforts – though the actual spending is likely to soar even higher due to widespread interest in its programs and subsidies – and accounts for a bulk of projected U.S. emissions cuts this decade.

    Trump’s views on this kind of spending are no mystery: His first White House budget director dismissed climate programs as “a waste of your money,” and Trump himself promised last summer to “terminate these Green New Deal atrocities on Day One.”

    House Republicans have attempted to claw back parts of Biden’s climate law several times. That’s merely a political messaging effort for now, thanks to a Democrat-held Senate and a sure veto from Biden, but the prospects flip if the GOP gains full control of Congress and White House.

    Under a plan hatched by Tubiana and backed by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, countries would in the future log their state and local government climate plans with the U.N., in an attempt to undergird the entire system against a second Republican blitzkrieg.

    The U.S. isn’t the only place where climate action is on the ballot, Benton told the conference at Chatham House on Nov. 1.

    News on Sunday that Argentina had elected as president right-wing populist Javier Milei — a Trump-like libertarian — raised the prospect of a major Latin American economy walking away from the Paris Agreement, either by formally withdrawing or by reneging on its promises.

    Elections are also scheduled in 2024 for the EU, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Russia, and possibly the U.K. 

    “A quarter of the world’s population is facing elections in the next nine months,” he said. “If everyone goes to the right and populism becomes the order of the day … then I won’t hold out high hopes for Paris.”

    Zack Colman reported from Washington, D.C. Suzanne Lynch also contributed reporting from Brussels.

    This article is part of the Road to COP special report, presented by SQM. The article is produced with full editorial independence by POLITICO reporters and editors. Learn more about editorial content presented by outside advertisers.

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    Karl Mathiesen, Charlie Cooper and Zack Colman

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  • West’s oil price cap fails to empty Russian war chest

    West’s oil price cap fails to empty Russian war chest

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    Western efforts to undermine the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine through a price cap on Russia’s all-important oil income are falling short. Hopes that Moscow could run out of cash for weapons and soldiers’ salaries are fading, industry insiders warn, as Russia sells its oil exports well above a $60-per-barrel price cap imposed by the G7+ nations, boosted by strong Chinese and Indian demand.

    Russia’s main crude blend, Urals, broke through the cap imposed by G7+ countries on the open market in June, and has since pushed above $80 per barrel last month. It is currently trading at around $75 a barrel.

    That means Russian President Vladimir Putin can keep the war going for longer: Strong oil revenues allow Moscow to purchase more arms and bolster the civilian economy. Isolating Russia from global markets has been a key pillar of the U.S. and EU strategy to counter the invasion, along with supplying weapons to Ukraine. Russian spending plans reveal that it will allocate a third of its annual budget to defense next year, indicating its top brass are confident they can outlast and outspend the West.

    Besides higher prices, Russia is also selling more crude by volume, with seaborne exports rising 10 percent last month to 3.37 million barrels a day — well above the pre-war average of 3.1 million, according to data from commodities giant S&P.

    “The price cap has absolutely failed,” Fotios Katsoulas, lead analyst for tanker shipping at S&P, told POLITICO from London. “Across the market we expect that all of the cargoes of Russian barrels are now trading above the price cap.”

    The high prices are driven by a strong global market, he said, with benchmark Brent crude flirting with $100 a barrel in recent weeks. With benchmarks so high, Russian crude offers a tempting discount even at $80 or more.

    Russia has been working to actively subvert the sanctions, taking advantage of a “shadow fleet” of aging tankers willing to carry oil in violation of the sanctions — often obscuring their ownership and even hiding the true origin of their cargo.

    “New companies have been established in the [United Arab] Emirates, India, China and so on, increasing the tonnage they control, buying older vessels, not operating under Western insurance providers,” said Katsoulas, arguing the move means they’re effectively immune to the consequences of violating the price cap. China and India are now the largest destinations for Russian seaborne crude, followed by Turkey.

    A senior economist at one major trading firm, granted anonymity to speak frankly on sensitive regulatory issues, warned there is little Western policymakers can do to enforce the rules without overheating an already frothy market.

    “The U.S. administration probably will prefer to not penalize freight and insurance companies involved in breaking the $60 limit because that would risk even higher crude oil prices,” the trader said.

    You can leave your cap on

    A spokesperson for the European Commission acknowledged that there had been “recent fluctuations in oil prices above the G7+ price cap level,” but insisted “this does not mean that the price cap is not working.”

    “To continue the successful enforcement of the oil price caps across the international coalition, it is indeed vital to counter Russian attempts to undermine its functioning,” the official added, pointing out that the bloc has sought to target rogue ship operators in its 11th package of sanctions against Moscow in May.

    Strong oil revenues allow Moscow to purchase more arms and bolster the civilian economy | Matthew Stockman/Getty Images

    Maria Shagina, a sanctions researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, cautioned against giving up on the price cap. Instead, “we now need to make sure the cap is watertight, that the mechanism is more robust than it is now.”

    “Tighter enforcement would make a difference to the Russian budget — when there was more compliance from January through to August we saw Russian revenues drop 50 percent year on year and they struggled to cope with social spending and war-related spending,” Shagina said. “Now the cap is failing, but it hasn’t ultimately failed. If we tighten the screws we can bring it back to life.”

    That could be difficult without the U.S. Last month, five diplomats from EU countries told POLITICO that despite growing awareness that the restrictions aren’t functioning properly, there is little appetite among the bloc’s governments to change it. “The Americans have said from their point of view that it’s working,” said one envoy, with another pointing out that little would change without U.S. support for tighter rules.

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s top economic adviser, Oleg Ustenko, used an interview with POLITICO in August to urge the West to both tighten the cap to just $30, and to close a “loophole” that allows countries like India, Turkey and China to export fuel refined from Russian crude to the global market without restrictions.

    Responding to a request for comment, the U.S. State Department said that “the coalition continues to watch market conditions closely” and argued that current measures have already “rendered the Russian military-industrial complex unable to produce and maintain critical equipment for operations in Ukraine.”

    Victor Jack contributed reporting.

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    Gabriel Gavin

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  • After Brexit, Britain and Europe embrace ever-closer union

    After Brexit, Britain and Europe embrace ever-closer union

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    LONDON — It was the gleaming smiles and mutual backslapping of two 40-something banker bros which signalled a new era of U.K.-EU relations. 

    British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron looked like natural bedfellows as they riffed off one another at a friendly Paris press conference in March, announcing a sizeable £478 million package to deter migrant crossings through the English Channel.

    The contrast with the petty name-calling of the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss eras was clear to see.

    Sunak’s warm and productive summit with Europe’s most high-profile leader confirmed a more collaborative relationship with the EU and its national capitals after the turmoil of the Brexit era. Less than two weeks earlier, the British PM’s landmark Windsor Framework agreement with Brussels had finally resolved post-Brexit trading issues in Northern Ireland.

    “My hope is that [the agreement] opens up other areas of constructive engagement and dialogue and cooperation with the EU,” Sunak told POLITICO en route to the Paris summit.

    Six months on, his words have been borne out.

    In addition to the Windsor Framework and English Channel agreements, Britain has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Brussels on regulatory cooperation in financial services, and this month rejoined the EU’s massive €96 billion Horizon and Copernicus science research programs — a major result for the U.K.’s research and university sectors after two years of uncertainty.

    Next on the agenda is a cooperation deal between the British government and the EU’s border protection agency Frontex — another move that brings Britain closer to the EU in a small but meaningful way.

    The deal, confirmed by the Home Secretary Suella Braverman on Tuesday, is expected to be similar to other deals Frontex has with non-EU countries, like Albania, which allow the sharing of data on migration flows.

    “We have seen concrete steps created by a new climate of good faith,” said a London-based European diplomat, granted anonymity — like others in this article — to speak candidly about diplomatic relations.

    “We missed that before, and so that’s the Sunak effect. I wouldn’t say he’s done an amazing job, but he’s changed the state of mind — and therefore he has changed everything.”

    A new hope

    In addition to a renewed focus on relations with fellow leaders, Sunak has impressed EU diplomats with his willingness to face down the vocal Brexiteer wing of his own party, which has long seemed — to European eyes — to hold outsized influence over successive Tory prime ministers.

    Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak proclaimed a “new chapter” in post-Brexit relations with the European Union after securing a breakthrough deal to regulate trade in Northern Ireland | Pool photo by Dan Kitwood/AFP via Getty Images

    Earlier this year Sunak enraged Tory right-wingers by abandoning a controversial pledge to scrap or rewrite thousands of EU-era regulatory laws which remain on the British statute book by the end of this year, to the delight of EU capitals.

    “The improving relationship is built on the fact there’s now a willingness to find solutions and engage in a way that wasn’t there in the previous administrations,” a second London-based European diplomat said.

    Negotiations continue between Sunak’s government and Brussels over other outstanding areas of dispute — chief among them tough new tariffs due to be imposed in January on electric vehicles (EVs) being shipped in and out of the U.K. which do not conform to strict sourcing requirements for electric batteries.

    On Wednesday the U.K.-EU Trade Specialised Committee will meet to discuss the issue, with British ministers increasingly hopeful Brussels will agree to scrap the end-of-year deadline after heavy lobbying from German automakers and its own European Commissioner for trade, Valdis Dombrovskis.

    Catherine Barnard, a European law professor at Cambridge University, said overall Sunak had overseen a “much more positive relationship” with Europe, albeit one conducted on a “pay-as-you-go basis.”

    “This is looking much more positive and it’s putting some meaning on dealing with our European neighbors as friends, rather than as foes,” she said.

    “But equally, we’re not talking about a comprehensive and thorough renegotiation — quite the contrary.”

    No. 10 Downing Street agrees the shift is less profound than some media observers — or grumbling Tory MPs — would like to think.

    A No. 10 aide said Sunak sees his diplomatic efforts as “normal government,” noting that “we’ve just forgotten what it looks like” after the turmoil of the post-Brexit era.

    “I know it’s following Brexit and all that nonsense we’ve seen over the last few years, and it’s nice to see any small win or small argument to bridge that divide, but this is just normal government relations,” the aide said.

    Labour pains

    Sunak, of course, is 18 points behind in the opinion polls and faces an uphill struggle to stay in office at a general election expected next year.

    But his opponent, U.K. Labour leader Keir Starmer, has made clear he too wants closer cooperation with Europe should he seize power.

    A senior moderate Tory MP said that despite the attacks on Starmer, Sunak is “not overly ideological when it comes to the EU” | Kiran Ridley/Getty Images

    Starmer said this month a future Labour government would use the upcoming review of the post-Brexit trade deal, expected in 2025 or 2026, as a chance to reduce border checks through the signing of a veterinary agreement and to increase U.K.-EU mobility for some sectors of the economy.

    And he told a conference in Montreal last weekend that that “we don’t want to diverge from the EU” in areas such as working conditions or environmental standards.

    These comments were seized upon by Tory ministers as evidence that Starmer would bring the U.K. even further into the EU’s orbit than he has publicly admitted — something the Labour leader denies. Tory campaigners hope to use such comments in campaign attacks painting Starmer as an anti-Brexit europhile.

    But some observers suggest such political attacks are ironic, given Sunak’s own direction of travel. Barnard, quoted above, says that “what Keir Starmer was saying in Canada last week is pretty much a description of where we’re at at the moment.”

    A senior moderate Tory MP said that despite the attacks on Starmer, Sunak is “not overly ideological when it comes to the EU.”

    “There’s always been a belief in Brussels that we would inevitably come crawling back to them, and we’re seeing that a bit now,” they said.

    Nevertheless, it is unclear how much closer Britain and the EU can get without a fundamental renegotiation of the terms of Brexit — something all sides insist is off the table.

    One area for agreement is the need for enhanced security and defence links, with next year’s European Political Community Summit in Britain providing a potential opportunity for further announcements.

    Some in Westminster speculate that this could come in the form of Britain joining individual projects of the EU’s Permanent Structured Cooperation — a body which coordinates the bloc’s security and defence policy. The European Council invited Britain to join its “military mobility project” alongside Canada, Norway and the U.S. in November 2022.

    Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe think tank , said he’s “not convinced” of the potential benefits for Britain, considering the U.K.’s existing position in NATO and other organizations.

    He believes the British government will run out of road in finding mutually beneficial areas of cooperation with Brussels.

    “The EU is relatively happy with the status quo,” Menon said. “It’s only in the U.K. where people say we need to move closer … There are so many bigger fish to fry for the EU.”

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    Stefan Boscia

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  • How Silicon Valley doomers are shaping Rishi Sunak’s AI plans

    How Silicon Valley doomers are shaping Rishi Sunak’s AI plans

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    LONDON — Back in the spring, Britain was sounding pretty relaxed about the rise of AI. Then something changed.

    The country’s artificial intelligence white paper — unveiled in March — dealt with the “existential risks” of the fledgling tech in just four words: high impact, low probability.

    Less than six months later, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak seems newly troubled by runaway AI. He has announced an international AI Safety Summit, referred to “existential risk” in speeches, and set up an AI safety taskforce with big global aspirations.

    Helping to drive this shift in focus is a chorus of AI Cassandras associated with a controversial ideology popular in Silicon Valley.

    Known as “Effective Altruism,” the movement was conceived in the ancient colleges of Oxford University, bankrolled by the Silicon Valley elite, and is increasingly influential on the U.K.’s positioning on AI.

    Not everyone’s convinced it’s the right approach, however, and there’s mounting concern Britain runs the risk of regulatory capture.

    The race to ‘God-like AI’ 

    Effective altruists claim that super-intelligent AI could one day destroy humanity, and advocate policy that’s focused on the distant future rather than the here-and-now. Despite the potential risks, EAs broadly believe super-intelligent AI should be pursued at all costs.

    “The view is that the outcome of artificial super-intelligence will be binary,” says Émile P. Torres, philosopher and former EA, turned critic of the movement. “That if it’s not utopia, it’s annihilation.” 

    In the U.K., key government advisers sympathetic to the movement’s concerns, combined with Sunak’s close contact with leaders of the AI labs – which have longstanding ties to the movement – have helped push “existential risk” right up the U.K.’s policy agenda.

    When ChatGPT-mania reached its zenith in April, tech investor Ian Hogarth penned a viral Financial Times article warning that the race to “God-like AI” “could usher in the obsolescence or destruction of the human race” – urging policymakers and AI developers to pump the brakes. 

    It echoed the influential “AI pause” letter calling for a moratorium on “giant AI experiments,” and, in combination with a later letter saying AI posed an extinction risk, helped fuel a frenzied media cycle that prompted Sunak to issue a statement claiming he was “looking very carefully” at this class of risks.

    Known as “Effective Altruism,” the movement was conceived in the ancient colleges of Oxford University, bankrolled by the Silicon Valley elite, and is increasingly influential on the U.K.’s positioning on AI | Carl Court/Getty Images

    “These kinds of arguments around existential risk or the idea that AI would develop super-intelligence, that was very much on the fringes of credible discussion,” says Mhairi Aitken, an AI ethics researcher at the Alan Turing Institute. “That’s really dramatically shifted in the last six months.”

    The EA community credited Hogarth’s FT article with telegraphing these ideas to a mainstream audience, and hailed his appointment as chair of the U.K.’s Foundation Model Taskforce as a significant moment.

    Under Hogarth, who has previously invested in AI labs Anthropic, Faculty, Helsing, and AI safety firm Conjecture, the taskforce announced a new set of partners last week – a number of whom have ties to EA.

    Three of the four partner organizations on the lineup are bankrolled by EA donors. The Centre for AI Safety is the organization behind the “AI extinction risk” letter (the “AI pause” letter was penned by another EA-linked organization, the Future of Life Institute). Its primary funding – to the tune of $5.2 million – comes from major EA donor organization, Open Philanthropy.  

    Another partner is Arc Evals, which “works on assessing whether cutting-edge AI systems could pose catastrophic risks to civilization.”

    It’s a project of the Alignment Research Centre, an organization that has received $1.5 million from Open Philanthropy, $1.25 million from high-profile EA Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX Foundation (which it promised to return after the implosion of his crypto empire), and $3.25 million from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, set up by Skype founder and prominent EA, Jaan Tallinn. Arc Evals is advised by Open Philanthropy CEO, Harold Karnofsky. 

    Finally, the Community Intelligence Project, a body working on new governance models for transformative technology, began life with an FTX regrant, and a co-founder appealed to the EA community for funding and expertise this year. 

    Joining the taskforce as one of two researchers is Cambridge professor David Krueger, who has received a $1 million grant from Open Philanthropy to further his work to “reduce the risk of human extinction resulting from out-of-control AI systems”. He describes himself as “EA-adjacent.” One of the PhD students Kruger advises, Nitarshan Rajkumar, has been working with the British government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) as an AI policy adviser since April. 

    A range of national security figures and renowned computer scientist, Yoshua Bengio, are also joining the taskforce as advisers. 

    Combined with its rebranding as a “Frontier AI Taskforce” which projects its gaze into the future of AI development, the announcements confirmed the ascendancy of existential risk on the U.K.’s AI agenda. 

    ‘X-risk’

    Hogarth told the FT that biosecurity risks – like AI systems designing novel viruses – and AI-powered cyber-attacks weigh heavily on his mind. The taskforce is intended to address these threats, and to help build safe and reliable “frontier” AI models.

    When ChatGPT-mania reached its zenith in April, tech investor Ian Hogarth penned a viral Financial Times article warning that the race to “God-like AI” “could usher in the obsolescence or destruction of the human race” | John Phillips/Getty Images

    “The focus of the Frontier AI Taskforce and the U.K.’s broader AI strategy extends to not only managing risk, but ensuring the technology’s benefits can be harnessed and its opportunities realized across society,” said a government spokesperson, who disputed the influence of EA on its AI policy.

    But some researchers worry that the more prosaic threats posed by today’s AI models, like bias, data privacy, and copyright issues, have been downgraded. It’s “a really dangerous distraction from the discussions we need to be having around regulation of AI,” says Aitken. “It takes a lot of the focus away from the very real and ethical risks and harms that AI presents today.”

    The EA movement’s links to Silicon Valley also prompt some to question its objectivity. The three most prominent AI labs, OpenAI, DeepMind and Anthropic, all boast EA connections – with traces of the movement variously imprinted on their ethos, ideology and wallets.

    Open Philanthropy, set up by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, provided OpenAI with a start-up loan of $30 million in 2017. Anthropic has pulled in hundreds of millions from EA organizations and individuals, and the executive team have a tangled web of links to movement. Skype’s Tallinn was also an early investor and former director in DeepMind, whose AI safety teams are populated with EA adherents.  

    Tech mogul Elon Musk claims to be a fan of the closely related “longtermist” ideology, calling it a “close match” to his own. Musk recently hired Dan Hendrycks, director of Center for AI Safety, as an adviser to his new start-up, xAI, which is also doing its part to prevent the AI apocalypse.

    To counter the threat, the EA movement is throwing its financial heft behind the field of AI safety. Head of Open Philanthropy, Harold Karnofsky, wrote a February blog post announcing a leave of absence to devote himself to the field, while an EA career advice center, 80,000 hours, recommends “AI safety technical research” and “shaping future governance of AI” as the two top careers for EAs.

    Tech mogul Elon Musk claims to be a fan of the closely related “longtermist” ideology, calling it a “close match” to his own | Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue

    Trading in an insular jargon of “X-risk” (existential risks) and “p(doom)” (the probability of our impending annihilation), the AI-focused branch of effective altruism is fixated on issues like “alignment” – how closely AI models are attuned to humanity’s value systems – amid doom-laden warnings about “proliferation” – the unchecked propagation of dangerous AI.  

    Despite its popularity among a cohort of technologists, critics say the movement’s thinking lacks evidence and is alarmist. A vocal critic, former Googler Timnit Gebru, has denounced this “dangerous brand of AI safety,” noting that she’d seen the movement gain “alarming levels of influence” in Silicon Valley.

    Meanwhile, the “strong intermingling” of EAs and companies building AI “has led…this branch of the community to be very subservient to the AI companies,” says Andrea Miotti, head of strategy and governance at AI safety firm Conjecture. He calls this a “real regulatory capture story.” 

    The pitch to industry 

    Citing the Center for AI Safety’s extinction risk letter, Hogarth called on AI specialists and safety researchers to join the taskforce’s efforts in June, noting that at “a pivotal moment, Rishi Sunak has stepped up and is playing a global leadership role.”

    On stage at the Tony Blair Institute conference in July, Hogarth – perspiring in the midsummer heat but speaking with composed conviction – struck an optimistic note. “We want to build stuff that allows for the U.K. to really have the state capacity to, like, engineer the future here,” he said.

    Although the taskforce was initially intended to build up sovereign AI capability, Hogarth’s arrival saw a new emphasis on AI safety. The U.K. government’s £100 million commitment is “the largest amount ever committed to this field by a nation state,” he tweeted. 

    Despite its popularity among a cohort of technologists, critics say the movement’s thinking lacks evidence and is alarmist | Hollie Adams/Getty Images

    The taskforce recruitment ad was shared on the Effective Altruism forum, and Hogarth’s appointment was announced in Effective Altruism UK’s July newsletter. 

    Hogarth is not the only one in government who appears to be sympathetic to the EA movement’s arguments. Matt Clifford, chair of government R&D body, ARIA, and adviser to the AI taskforce as well as AI sherpa for the safety summit, has urged EAs to jump aboard the government’s latest AI safety push. 

    “I would encourage any of you who care about AI safety to explore opportunities to join or be seconded into government, because there is just a huge gap of knowledge and context on both sides,” he said at the Effective Altruism Global conference in London in June. 

    “Most people engaged in policy are not familiar … with arguments that would be familiar to most people in this room about risk and safety,” he added, but cautioned that hyping apocalyptic risks was not typically an effective strategy when it came to dealing with policymakers.  

    Clifford said that ARIA would soon announce directors who will be in charge of grant-giving across different areas. “When you see them, you will see there is actually a pretty good overlap with some prominent EA cause areas,” he told the crowd. 

    A British government spokesperson said Clifford is “not part of the core Effective Altruism movement.”

    Civil service ties

    Influential civil servants also have EA ties. Supporting the work of the AI taskforce is Chiara Gerosa, who in addition to her government work is facilitating an introductory AI safety course “for a cohort of policy professionals” for BlueDot Impact, an organization funded by Effective Ventures, a philanthropic fund that supports EA causes. 

    The course “will get you up to speed on extreme risks from AI and governance approaches to mitigating these risks,” according to the website, which states alumni have gone on to work for the likes of OpenAI, GovAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind.  

    People close to the EA movement say that its disciples see the U.K.’s AI safety push as encouragement to get involved and help nudge policy along an EA trajectory. 

    EAs are “scrambling to be part of Rishi Sunak’s announced Foundation Model Taskforce and safety conference,” according to an AI safety researcher who asked not to be named as they didn’t want to risk jeopardizing EA connections.

    EAs are “scrambling to be part of Rishi Sunak’s announced Foundation Model Taskforce and safety conference,” according to an AI safety researcher | Pool photo by Justin Tallis via AFP/Getty Images

    “One said that while Rishi is not the ‘optimal’ candidate, at least he knows X-risk,” they said. “And that ‘we’ need political buy-in and policy.”  

    “The foundation model taskforce is really centring the voices of the private sector, of industry … and that in many cases overlaps with membership of the Effective Altruism movement,” says Aitken. “That to me, is very worrying … it should really be centring the voices of impacted communities, it should be centring the voices of civil society.” 

    Jack Stilgoe, policy co-lead of Responsible AI, a body funded by the U.K.’s R&D funding agency, is concerned about “the diversity of the taskforce.” “If the agenda of the taskforce somehow gets captured by a narrow range of interests, then that would be really, really bad,” he says, adding that the concept of alignment “offers a false solution to an imaginary problem.”

    A spokesperson for Open Philanthropy, Michael Levine, disputed that the EA movement carried any water for AI firms. “Since before the current crop of AI labs existed, people inspired by effective altruism were calling out the threats of AI and the need for research and policies to reduce these risks; many of our grantees are now supporting strong regulation of AI over objections from industry players.”

    From Oxford to Whitehall, via Silicon Valley 

    Birthed at Oxford University by rationalist utilitarian philosopher William MacAskill, EA began life as a technocratic preoccupation with how charitable donations could be optimized to wring out maximal benefit for causes like global poverty and animal welfare.  

    Over time, it fused with transhumanist and techno-utopian ideals popular in Silicon Valley, and a mutated version called “long-termism” that is fixated on ultra-long-term timeframes now dominates. MacAskill’s most recent book What We Owe the Future conceptualizes a million-year timeframe for humanity and advocates the colonization of space.  

    EA began life as a technocratic preoccupation with how charitable donations could be optimized to wring out maximal benefit for causes like global poverty and animal welfare. Over time, it fused with transhumanist and techno-utopian ideals popular in Silicon Valley | Mason Trinca/Getty Images

    Oxford University remains an ideological hub for the movement, and has spawned a thriving network of think tanks and research institutes that lobby the government on long-term or existential risks, including the Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI) and the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. 

    Other EA-linked organizations include Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, which was co-founded by Tallinn and receives funding from his Survival and Flourishing Fund – which is also the primary funder of the Centre for Long Term Resilience, set up by former civil servants in 2020. 

    The think tanks tend to overlap with leading AI labs, both in terms of membership and policy positions. For example, the founder and former director of GovAI, Allan Dafoe, who remains chair of the advisory board, is also head of long-term AI strategy and governance at DeepMind.  

    “We are conscious that dual roles of this form warrant careful attention to conflicts of interest,” reads the GovAI website.

    GovAI, OpenAI and Anthropic declined to offer comment for this piece. A Google DeepMind spokesperson said: “We are focused on advancing safe and responsible AI.”

    The movement has been accruing political capital in the U.K. for some time, says Luke Kemp, a research affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk who doesn’t identify as EA. “There’s definitely been a push to place people directly out of existential risk bodies into policymaking positions,” he says. 

    The movement has been accruing political capital in the U.K. for some time, says Luke Kemp, a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk who doesn’t identify as EA | Pool photo by Stefan Rousseau via AFP/Getty Images

    CLTR’s head of AI policy, Jess Whittlestone, is in the process of being seconded to DSIT on a one day a week basis to assist on AI policy leading up to the AI Safety Summit, according to a CLTR August update seen by POLITICO. In the interim, she is informally advising several policy teams across DSIT.

    A former specialist adviser to the Cabinet Office meanwhile, Markus Anderljung, is now head of policy at GovAI. 

    Kemp says he has expressed reservations about existential risk organizations attempting to get staff members seconded to government. “We can’t be trusted as objective and fair regulators or scholars, if we have such deep connections to the bodies we’re trying to regulate,” he says.   

    “I share the concern about AI companies dominating regulatory discussions, and have been advocating for greater independent expert involvement in the summit to reduce risks of regulatory capture,” said CLTR’s Head of AI Policy, Dr Jess Whittlestone. “It is crucial for U.K. AI policy to be informed by diverse perspectives.”

    Instead of the risks of existing foundation models like GPT-4, EA-linked groups and AI companies tend to talk up the “emergent” risks of frontier models  — a forward-looking stance that nudges the regulatory horizon into the future.

    This framing “is a way of suggesting that that’s why you need to have Big Tech in the room – because they are the ones developing these frontier models,” suggests Aitken.

    At the frontier

    Earlier in July, CLTR and GovAI collaborated on a paper about how to regulate so-called frontier models, alongside members of DeepMind, OpenAI, and Microsoft and academics. The paper explored the controversial idea of licensing the most powerful AI models, a proposal that’s been criticized for its potential to cement the dominance of leading AI firms.  

    Earlier in July, CLTR and GovAI collaborated on a paper about how to regulate so-called frontier models, alongside members of DeepMind, OpenAI, and Microsoft and academics | Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty Images

    CLTR presented the paper to No. 10 with the prime minister’s special advisers on AI and the director and deputy director of DSIT in attendance, according to the CLTR memo.  

    Such ideas appear to be resonating. In addition to announcing the “Frontier AI Taskforce”, the government said in September that the AI Summit would focus entirely on the regulation of “frontier AI.”

    The British government disputes the idea that its AI policy is narrowly focused. “We have engaged extensively with stakeholders in creating our AI regulation white paper, and have received a broad and diverse range of views as part of the recently closed consultation process which we will respond to in due course,” said a spokesperson. 

    Spokespeople for CLTR and CSER said that both groups focus on risks across the spectrum, from near-term to long-term, while a CLTR spokesperson stressed that it’s an independent and non-partisan think tank.

    Some say that it’s the external circumstances that have changed, rather than the effectiveness of the EA lobby. CSER professor Haydn Belfield, who identifies as an EA, says that existential risk think tanks have been petitioning the government for years – on issues like pandemic preparedness and nuclear risk in addition to AI.

    Although the government appears more receptive to their overtures now, “I’m not sure we’ve gotten any better at it,” he says. “I just think the world’s gotten worse.”

    Update: This story has been updated to clarify Luke Kemp’s job title.

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    Laurie Clarke

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  • ChatGPT boss wants HQ in Europe

    ChatGPT boss wants HQ in Europe

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    Sam Altman wants you to know he loves Europe.

    The CEO of OpenAI, the maker of the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, spent last week touring the Continent, stopping in Spain, France, Poland, Germany and the United Kingdom. He was at once talking AI regulation with policymakers — he met national leaders Pedro Sánchez, Emmanuel Macron, Mateusz Morawiecki, Olaf Scholz, and Rishi Sunak — and scouting locations for an OpenAI European office.

    “We really need an office in Europe,” Altman told POLITICO at a Paris event Friday. “We also just really want one.” Under the European Union’s upcoming Artificial Intelligence Act, companies with EU-based users would need a presence in the bloc, with national “supervisory authorities” in charge of implementing the regulation. The eventual choice of its HQ location will, therefore, determine which member country will oversee it when it comes to enforcing the AI Act.

    Since its launch in November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT — a bot able to create texts such as songs, scripts, articles and software based on written prompts — has caused both optimism and anxiety about what the rise of AI means for the future of humankind. While some have marveled at the tool’s prowess in creating computer code and streamlining office work, others fear that it could be used to generate troves of automated disinformation, manipulative content and biased material — or even put millions of people out of a job.

    Nevertheless, politicians appear eager to host the world’s hottest AI lab. Opening the event, French Digital Minister Jean-Noël Barrot read a ChatGPT-generated description of Altman (“innovative, influential, visionary”) before pitching France as a “great AI country” — rattling off a list that included talent, abundant nuclear energy (to power the computers underpinning the AI), and cultural heritage among its assets.

    In the U.K., where Altman also briefed national security personnel, a person familiar with his conversation with Sunak, who was granted anonymity to talk of high-level meetings, described the British prime minister as “deferential.”

    Altman is still deliberating on where to house the new office. “If you had to pick just based on the most AI research talent, you’d pick France,” he told POLITICO. “But I’ve been super-impressed by the talent and energy everywhere.” OpenAI already has staff working in London, according to LinkedIn, and in September 2022 it created a U.K. subsidiary, according to the country’s business registry.

    In Paris, Altman strove to quash reports, from Reuters, that OpenAI might leave the EU if the AI Act proved too onerous. “We plan to comply. We want to offer services in Europe,” Altman told the Parisian audience. “We just want to make sure we’re technically able to. And the conversations have been super-productive this week,” he added.

    First floated by the European Commission in 2021, the AI Act would ban some uses of AI uses (such as social scoring and some instances of facial recognition) and impose stricter rules related to safety and oversight when it comes to sensitive AI applications considered “high-risk.” On top of that, according to a version of the AI Act adopted earlier this month by lawmakers in the European Parliament, “generative” models such as ChatGPT — which can create new content, like text or photos — would have to disclose a summary of copyrighted materials used as training data.

    The rule — which still needs to be agreed upon by representatives of the Commission and EU member countries — addresses worries from artists and publishers that AI firms might use their intellectual property without their consent or knowledge.

    “That sounds like a great thing to ask for,” Altman told POLITICO. “But — due to the way these datasets are collected and the fact people have been copying data in different ways on different websites — to say I have to legally warrant every piece of copyrighted content in there is not as easy as it sounds.”

    Altman thinks an easier way for creators to know if their work is being used would be based on whether their names appear in the prompts users give to an AI. “Every time you ask, ‘I want a song in the style of the Beatles,’ that would be clear,” Altman said.

    Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the maker of the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

    All in all, however, Altman struck an optimistic tone about the AI Act and said he’d be happy to meet EU policymakers — despite skipping a planned Brussels stop in his tour. He told POLITICO that OpenAI would join the EU’s first “sandbox,” based in Spain, where AI companies will be able to test their regulatory compliance.

    “It’s going to get to a good place,” he said. “Regulatory clarity will be a good thing.”

    This article has been updated.

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    Gian Volpicelli

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  • Biden rebuffs UK bid for closer cooperation on tech

    Biden rebuffs UK bid for closer cooperation on tech

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    LONDON — Britain was rebuffed by the Biden administration after multiple requests to develop an advanced trade and technology dialogue similar to structures the U.S. set up with the European Union.

    On visits to Washington as a Cabinet minister over the past two years, Liz Truss urged U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and senior Biden administration officials to intensify talks with the U.K. to build clean technology supply chains and boost collaboration on artificial intelligence (AI) and semiconductors.

    After Truss became prime minister in fall 2022, the idea was floated again when Raimondo visited London last October, people familiar with the conversations told POLITICO. But fear of angering the U.S.’s European partners and the U.K.’s diminished status outside the EU post-Brexit have posed barriers to influencing Washington.

    Businesses, lawmakers and experts worry the U.K. is being left on the sidelines. 

    “We tried many times,” said a former senior Downing Street official, of the British government’s efforts to set up a U.K. equivalent to the U.S.-E.U. Trade and Technology Council (TTC), noting Truss’ overtures began as trade chief in July 2021. They requested anonymity to speak on sensitive issues.

    “We did speak to Gina Raimondo about that, saying ‘we think it would be a good opportunity,’” said the former official — not necessarily to join the EU-U.S. talks directly, “but to increase trilateral cooperation.”

    Set up in June 2021, the TTC forum co-chaired by Raimondo, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. trade chief Katherine Tai gives their EU counterparts, Margrethe Vestager and Valdis Dombrovskis, a direct line to shape tech and trade policy.

    The U.S. is pushing forward with export controls on advanced semiconductors to China; forging new secure tech supply chains away from Beijing; and spurring innovation through subsidies for cutting-edge green technology and microprocessors.

    The TTC’s 10 working groups with the EU, Raimondo said in an interview late last year, “set the standards,” though Brussels has rebuffed Washington’s efforts to use the transatlantic body to go directly after Beijing.

    But the U.K. “is missing the boat on not being completely engaged in that dialogue,” said a U.S.-based representative of a major business group. “There has been some discussion about the U.K. perhaps joining the TTC,” they confirmed, and “it was kind of mooted, at least in private” with Raimondo by the Truss administration on her visit to London last October.

    The response from the U.S. had been ‘’let’s work with what we’ve got at the moment,’” said the former Downing Street official.

    Even if the U.S. does want to talk, “they don’t want to irritate the Europeans,” the same former official added. Right now the U.K.’s conversations with the U.S. on these issues are “ad hoc” under the new Atlantic Charter Boris Johnson and Joe Biden signed around the G7 summit in 2021, they said, and “nothing institutional.”

    Last October, Washington and London held the first meeting of the data and tech forum Johnson and Biden set up | Pool photo by Olivier Matthys/AFP via Getty Images

    Securing British access to the U.S.-EU tech forum or an equivalent was also discussed when CBI chief Tony Danker was in Washington last July, said people familiar with conversations during his visit. 

    The U.K.’s science and tech secretary, Michelle Donelan, confirmed the British government had discussed establishing a more regular channel for tech and trade discussions with the U.S., both last October and more recently. “My officials have just been out [to the U.S.],” she told POLITICO. “They’ve had very productive conversations.”

    A U.K. government spokesperson said: “The U.K. remains committed to working closely with the U.S. and EU to further our shared trade and technology objectives, through the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, the U.S.-U.K. Future of Atlantic Trade dialogues, and the U.K.-U.S. technology partnership.

    “We will continue to advance U.K. interests in trade and technology and explore further areas of cooperation with partners where it is mutually beneficial.”

    Britain the rule-taker?

    Last October, Washington and London held the first meeting of the data and tech forum Johnson and Biden set up. Senior officials hoped to get a deal securing the free flow of data between the U.S. and U.K. across the line and addressed similar issues as the TTC.

    They couldn’t secure the data deal. The U.K. is expected to join a U.S.-led effort to expand data transfer rules baked into the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation trading agreement as soon as this year, according to a former and a current British official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The next formal meeting between the U.K. and U.S. is penciled in for January 2024.

    Ongoing dialogue “is vital to secure an overarching agreement on U.K.-U.S. data flows, without which modern day business cannot function,” said William Bain, head of trade policy at the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC). “It would also provide an opportunity to set the ground rules around a host of other technological developments.”

    In contrast, the U.S. and EU are always at work, with TTC officials in constant contact with the operation — though questions have been raised about how long-term the transatlantic cooperation is likely to prove, ahead of next year’s U.S. presidential election.

    “Unless you have a structured system or set up, often overseen by ministers, you don’t really get the drive to actually get things done,” said the former Downing Street official.

    Right now cooperation with the U.S. on tech issues is not as intense or structured as desired, the same former official said, and is “not really brought together” in one central forum.

    Britain has yet to publish a formal semiconductor strategy | Thomas Coex/AFP via Getty Images

    “This initiative [the TTC] between the world’s two regulatory powerhouses risks sidelining the U.K.,” warned lawmakers on the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee in a report last October. Britain may become “a rule-taker rather than a rule-maker,” MPs noted, citing the government’s “ambiguous” position on technology standards. Britain has yet to publish a formal semiconductor strategy, and others on critical minerals — like those used in EV batteries — or AI are also missing.

    Over the last two years, U.S. trade chief Tai has “spoken regularly to her three successive U.K. counterparts to identify and tackle shared economic and trade priorities,” said a spokesperson for the U.S. Trade Representative, adding “we intend to continue strengthening this partnership in the years to come.” 

    All eyes on Europe

    For its part, the EU has to date shown little interest in closer cooperation with the U.K.

    Three European Commission officials disregarded the likelihood of Britain joining the club, though one of those officials said that London may be asked to join — alongside other like-minded countries — for specific discussions related to ongoing export bans against Russia.

    Even with last week’s breakthrough over the Northern Ireland protocol calming friction between London and Brussels, the U.K. was not a priority country for involvement in the TTC, added another of the EU officials.

    “The U.K. was extremely keen to be part of a dialogue of some sort of equivalent of TTC,” said a senior business representative in London, who requested anonymity to speak about sensitive issues.

    U.K. firms see “the Holy Grail” as Britain, the U.S. and EU working together on this, they said. “We’re very keen to see a triangular dialogue at some point.”

    The U.K.’s haggling with the EU over the details of the Northern Ireland protocol governing trade in the region has posed “a political obstacle” to realizing that vision, they suggested.

    Yet with a solution to the dispute announced in late February, the same business figure said, “there will be a more prominent push to work together with the U.K.”

    TTC+

    Some trade experts think the UK would increase its chances of accession to the TTC if it submitted a joint request with other nations.

    But prior to that happening, “I think the EU-U.S. TTC will need to first deliver bilaterally,” said Sabina Ciofu, an international tech policy expert at the trade body techUK. 

    Representatives speak to the media following the Trade and Technology Council Meeting in Maryland | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

    When there is momentum, Ciofu said, the U.K. should join forces with Japan, South Korea and other advanced economies to ask for a TTC+ that could include the G7 or other partners. At the last TTC meeting in December, U.S. and EU officials said they were open to such an expansion around specific topics that had global significance.

    But not all trade experts think this is essential. Andy Burwell, director of international trade at the CBI, said he doesn’t “think it necessarily matters” whether the U.K. has a structured conversation with the U.S. like the TTC forum.

    Off the back of a soon-to-be-published refresh of the Integrated Review — the U.K.’s national security and foreign policy strategy — Prime Minister Rishi Sunak should instead seize the opportunity, Burwell said, to pinpoint where Britain is “going to own, collaborate and have access to various aspects of the supply chains.”

    The G7, Burwell said, “could be the right platform for having some of those conversations.”

    Yet the “danger with the ad hoc approach with lots of different people is incoherence,” said the former Downing Street official quoted above.

    Too many countries involved in setting the standards can, the former official said, “create difficulty in leveraging what you want — which is all of the countries agreeing together on a certain way forward … especially when you’re dealing with issues that relate to, for example, China.”

    Additional reporting by Mark Scott, Annabelle Dickson and Tom Bristow

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    Graham Lanktree

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  • Von der Leyen’s Davos tightrope: Calm Europe, reframe US spat

    Von der Leyen’s Davos tightrope: Calm Europe, reframe US spat

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    The EU chief argued Europe and the US should team up against China to secure a climate-friendly future.

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    Suzanne Lynch

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  • Europe turns on TikTok

    Europe turns on TikTok

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    In the United States, TikTok is a favorite punching ball for lawmakers who’ve compared the Chinese-owned app to “digital fentanyl” and say it should be banned.

    Now that hostility is spreading to Europe, where fears about children’s safety and reports that TikTok spied on journalists using their IP locations are fueling a backlash against the video-sharing app used by more than 250 million Europeans.

    As TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew heads to Brussels on Tuesday to meet with top digital policymaker Margrethe Vestager amid a wider reappraisal of EU ties with China, his company faces a slew of legal, regulatory and security challenges in the bloc — as well as a rising din of public criticism.

    One of the loudest critics is French President Emmanuel Macron, who has called TikTok “deceptively innocent” and a cause of “real addiction” among users, as well as a source of Russian disinformation. Such comments have gone hand-in-hand with aggressive media coverage in France, including Le Parisien daily’s December 29 front page calling TikTok “A real danger for the brains of our children.”

    New restrictions may be in order. During a trip to the United States in November, Macron told a group of American investors and French tech CEOs that he wanted to regulate TikTok, according to two people in the room. TikTok denies it is harmful and says it has measures to protect kids on the app.

    While it wasn’t clear what rules Macron was referring to — his office declined to comment — the remarks added to a darkening tableau for TikTok. In addition to two EU-wide privacy probes that are set to wrap up in coming months, TikTok has to contend with extensive new requirements on content moderation under the bloc’s new digital rulebook, the DSA, from mid-2023 — as well as the possibility of being caught up in the bloc’s new digital competition rulebook, the Digital Markets Act.

    In answers to emailed questions, France’s digital minister Jean-Noel Barrot said that France would rely on the DSA and DMA to regulate TikTok at an EU level, though he “remained vigilant on these ever-evolving models” of ad-supported social media. Barrot added that he “never failed to maintain a level of pressure appropriate to the stakes of the DSA” in meetings with TikTok executives.

    Ahead of Chew’s visit to Brussels, Thierry Breton, the bloc’s internal market commissioner, warned him about the need to “respect the integrality of our rules,” according to comments the commissioner made in Spain, reported by Reuters. A spokesperson for Vestager said she aimed to “review how the company was preparing for complying with its (possible) obligations under our regulation.”

    That said, the probes TikTok is facing deal with suspected violations that have already taken place. If Ireland’s data regulator, which leads investigations on behalf of other EU states, finds that TikTok has broken the bloc’s privacy rulebook, the General Data Protection Regulation, fines could amount to up to 4 percent of the firm’s global turnover. Penalties can be even higher under the DSA, which starts applying to big platforms in mid-2023.

    Spying fears

    And yet, having to fork over a few million euros could be the least of TikTok’s troubles in Europe, as some lawmakers here are following their U.S. peers to call for much tougher restrictions on the app amid fears that data from TikTok will be used for spying.

    TikTok is under investigation for sending data on EU users to China — one of two probes being led by Ireland. Reports that TikTok employees in China used TikTok data to track the movements of two Western journalists only intensified spying fears, especially in privacy-conscious Germany. (TikTok acknowledged the incident and fired four employees over what they said was unauthorized access to user data.)

    One of the loudest critics is French President Emmanuel Macron, who has called TikTok “deceptively innocent” and a cause of “real addiction” among users | Pool photo by Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images

    Citing a “lack of data security and data protection” as well as data transfers to China, the digital policy spokesman for Germany’s Social Democratic Party group in the Bundestag said that the U.S. ban on TikTok for federal employees’ phones was “understandable.”

    “I think it makes sense to also critically examine applications such as TikTok and, if necessary, to take measures. I would therefore advise civil servants, but also every citizen, not to install untrustworthy services and apps on their smartphones,” Jens Zimmermann added.

    Maximilian Funke-Kaiser, digital policy spokesman for the liberal FDP group in German parliament, went even further raising the prospect of a full ban on use of TikTok on government phones. “In view of the privacy and security risks posed by the app and the app’s far-reaching access rights, I consider the ban on TikTok on the work phones of U.S. government officials to be appropriate. Corresponding steps should also be examined in Germany.”

    For Moritz Körner, a centrist lawmaker in European Parliament, the potential risks linked to TikTok are far greater than with Twitter due to the former’s larger user base — at least five times as many users as Twitter in Europe — and the fact that up to a third of its users are aged 13-19. 

    “The China-app TikTok should be under the special surveillance of the European authorities,” he wrote in an email. “The fight between autocratic and democratic systems will also be fought via digital platforms. Europe has to wake up.”

    In Switzerland, lawmakers called earlier this month for a ban on officials’ phones.

    Call for a ban

    So far, though, no European government or public body has followed the U.S. in banning TikTok usage on officials’ phones. In response to questions from POLITICO, a spokesperson for the European Commission — which previously advised its employees against using Meta’s WhatsApp — wrote that any restriction on TikTok usage for EU civil servants would “require a political decision and will be based on the careful assessment of data protection cybersecurity concerns, and others.”

    The spokesperson also pointed out that “there are no official Commission accounts” on TikTok.

    A spokesperson for the European Parliament said its services “continuously monitor” for cybersecurity issues, but that “due to the nature of security matters, we don’t comment further on specific platforms.”

    POLITICO reached out to cybersecurity agencies for the EU, the U.K. and Germany to ask if they had or were planning any restrictions or recommendations having to do with TikTok. None flagged any specific restrictions, which doesn’t mean there aren’t any. In Germany, for example, officials who use iPhones can’t use or download TikTok in the section of their phone where confidential data can be accessed.

    The European Commission has previously advised its employees against using Meta’s WhatsApp | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images

    For Hamburg’s data protection agency, one of 16 in Germany’s federal system, restricting TikTok on official phones would be a good idea.

    “Based on what we know from the available sources, we share, among other things, the concerns of the U.S. government that you mentioned and would therefore welcome it appropriate for government agencies in the EU to refrain from using TikTok,” a spokesperson said.

    This suggests that the most immediate public threat for TikTok in Europe is privacy-related. Of the two probes being conducted by Ireland’s privacy regulator, the one looking into child safety on the app is the closest to wrapping up, according to a spokesperson for the Irish Data Protection Commission.

    Depending on the outcome of discussions between EU privacy regulators — the child safety probe is likely to trigger a dispute resolution mechanism — TikTok could face new requirements to verify age in the EU. The other probe, looking into TikTok’s transfers of data to China, is likely to wrap up around mid-year or toward the end of 2023 if a dispute is triggered, the spokesperson said.

    Antoaneta Roussi contributed reporting.

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    Nicholas Vinocur, Clothilde Goujard, Océane Herrero and Louis Westendarp

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  • UK takes fresh stab at internet rules as EU framework surges ahead

    UK takes fresh stab at internet rules as EU framework surges ahead

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    LONDON — The United Kingdom wants to police the internet. Shame the European Union got there first. 

    Brexit was supposed to let Britain do things quicker. But less than a month after the 27-member bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA) went into force, London is still struggling to cobble together its own version of the rulebook, known as the Online Safety Bill. 

    On Monday it tried again, with Britain’s Digital Secretary Michelle Donelan presenting a tweaked bill to parliament. It got the backing of MPs, but faces fresh committee scrutiny before heading to the House of Lords. And the path to a settled law still looks far from certain. 

    The bill, which seeks to make Britain “the safest place in the world to be online” has not only been a casualty of the country’s political instability — it has also proved a divisive issue for the country’s governing Conservative Party, where a vocal minority of backbenchers still view it as an unnecessary limit to free speech.

    “Far from being world-leading, the government has been beaten to the punch in regulating online spaces by numerous jurisdictions, including Canada, Australia and the EU,” said Lucy Powell, the opposition Labour Party’s shadow digital secretary.

    Powell said the latest version of the Online Safety Bill was also at risk of getting stuck due to “chaos in government and vested interests,” adding that it was imperative the bill pass through the legislature by April, when the current parliamentary session ends. 

    Much of the disagreement over the bill has centered on rules policing so-called legal-but-harmful content. That’s been largely dropped from the latest version of the planned law, after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government bowed to pressure from right-wing MPs within his own party, who argued that the provisions threatened free speech.

    In the previous iteration of the bill, Ofcom, the country’s telecommunications and media regulator, was on the hook for enforcing rules that required social media giants to take action against potentially harmful but technically legal material like the promotion of self-harm.

    The government’s scrapping of legal-but-harmful content hasn’t been universally welcomed, however. Nadine Dorries, Donelan’s predecessor as digital secretary, proposed the provisions and has griped that they’d already passed parliamentary scrutiny before the bill was paused. 

    Long and winding road

    Britain’s attempts to regulate the internet really got going under Theresa May, who became prime minister in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, and as lawmakers were beginning to become more tech-skeptic.

    The Tories’ May 2017 election manifesto promised that “online rules should reflect those that govern our lives offline,” but by the time Boris Johnson published his 2019 election offering, the Conservatives were also promising to protect the most vulnerable from accessing harmful content. Under Johnson’s close ally Dorries, a version of the legislation tackling legal-but-harmful content started to make its way through Parliament, before it was put on pause after he was ousted by Tory MPs.

    Johnson, the former prime minister, often seemed caught between his own personal free speech philosophy and his populist instincts of attacking Big Tech.

    The summer Tory leadership contest to replace Johnson reignited the debate, with contenders promising to look again at the law before the legal-but-harmful content provisions were ultimately watered down. Donelan replaced Dorries, becoming the seventh culture secretary since Brexit.

    The EU’s path to its online rulebook has been quicker. In part that’s because questions over free speech haven’t yet become the political touchpaper that they now are in the Anglosphere. Nevertheless the EU mostly side-stepped the issue by keeping its own rulebook more squarely aimed at purely illegal content, and the European Commission has made it clear public it does not want to create a so-called “Ministry of Truth.” 

    That means the EU hasn’t had to contend with the deep divisions the Online Safety Bill has prompted in the U.K., especially among the governing Tories.

    Instead, Brussels’ institutions have been mainly aligned on the key aspects of its framework, the DSA. The European Parliament and Council of the EU — representing the 27 European governments — largely supported the European Commission’s cautious approach to create rules to crack down on public-facing content illegal under EU or national laws like child sexual abuse material or terrorist propaganda. 

    When it comes to legal-but-harmful content, the EU’s approach requires very large online platforms — those with more than 45 million European users — to assess and limit the spread of content like disinformation and cyberbullying under the watch of regulators. Europe’s rules also have gone further than those on the other side of the channel by including mandated risk assessment and audits for tech giants like Meta and Alphabet so that they can be held accountable for potential wrongdoing. In the U.K., the main enforcement has been left to Ofcom via investigations. 

    Disagreements, when they came in Europe, have been on the edges, rather than at the core of the debate. Rows focused on limits to targeted ads and the level of obligations for online marketplaces like Amazon to carry out random checks on dangerous products on their platforms. In another example, some EU countries like France and Germany pushed and failed to force a 24-hour deadline for online platforms to take down illegal content. 

    Not just free speech

    In the U.K., it’s not just free speech issues that have proved controversial. The EU set out separate rules aiming to clamp down on child sexual abuse material online, but the U.K. poured similar provisions into the Online Safety Bill.

    That means high-stakes questions over how and whether the monitoring requirements undermine privacy — especially in encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp — are being dealt with separately in the EU. But in the U.K. they’ve been thrown into the same mix as wide-ranging free speech debates.

    Differences between the rulebooks also raise the prospect of costly regulatory misalignment. While the U.K. bill slaps general monitoring requirements on the tech companies themselves, that’s explicitly banned by the EU.  Last month, the British regulator and its Australian counterpart created a new Western coalition of online content regulators, though failed to invite any EU counterparts to those discussions. Only Ireland’s watchdog joined as an observer.

    “This is about setting up our international engagement in expectation of setting up our rules,” Melanie Dawes, Ofcom’s chief executive, told POLITICO when announcing that initiative. “The success of this is about bringing together international partners.”

    Clothilde Goujard reported from Brussels.

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    Vincent Manancourt, Annabelle Dickson, Clothilde Goujard and Mark Scott

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  • Meta faces record EU privacy fines

    Meta faces record EU privacy fines

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    This Christmas is bound to be an expensive one for U.S. tech giant Meta.

    The Big Tech firm looks set to soon face a huge regulatory bill for all three of its social networks, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. Europe’s privacy regulator body, the European Data Protection Board, is expected to issue decisions on Monday that target the three platforms, after which Meta’s lead regulator in Ireland will issue a final decision within a month.

    The detail and possible value of the monetary penalty will remain under wraps until then, but the triplet of fines could add up to over €2 billion, financial statements by Meta indicate — setting a new record for the highest fines under the European Union’s feared General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) received by a single company in one go.

    According to filings in Ireland, Meta has set aside €3 billion for EU privacy fines in 2022 and 2023. Its platform Instagram already got slapped with a €405 million fine in September for violating kids’ privacy, and Facebook so far has accumulated €282 million in penalties for data breaches as well as a €60 million hit from the French. That leaves well over €2 billion earmarked by the firm for regulatory action.

    That’s a substantial hit for Meta, which announced last month it was laying off 11,000 employees globally amid lower sales and major costs linked to the firm’s pivot to the metaverse.

    Beyond hitting Meta’s pocket, the three fines expected within weeks could also put a bomb under its broader business model. The decisions stem from complaints filed by Austrian activist Max Schrems accusing the company of failing to have proper legal grounds to process millions of Europeans’ data. If the final decisions invalidate Meta’s argument that it’s processing data as part of a contract with users, the company would have to seek another legal basis for its data-fuelled ad targeting model.

    The cases have also revealed deep fissures between Europe’s data watchdogs.

    Ireland’s data protection commission largely backed Meta’s argument that it could claim it needs data to fulfill a “contract” with its users to provide personalized ads, in its draft decision issued a year ago. But that reasoning has long put Ireland in the minority amongst its colleagues. The Norwegian data protection authority said the Irish interpretation would render European data protection law “pointless,” according to a document obtained by POLITICO last year. The Irish regulator was also alone in voting against EU guidelines that banned companies from using the contract legal basis to use data to target ads.

    The three decisions are likely to lay into the Irish regulator’s initial position and, more worryingly for Meta, amp up the pressure for the company to go scrambling for new legal ways to gather and process data on Europeans.

    Meta also still faces an ongoing, high-profile probe into the company’s transfers of Europeans’ data to the U.S.

    Meta declined to comment. It can still appeal the fines coming out of the coming decisions.

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    Vincent Manancourt

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  • Elon Musk gives Europe’s digital watchdogs their biggest test yet

    Elon Musk gives Europe’s digital watchdogs their biggest test yet

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    Voiced by artificial intelligence.

    After Elon Musk bought Twitter — and fired almost anyone whose job it was to deal with regulators — the social networking giant is now facing a flood of legal challenges across the European Union.

    The question now is whether the EU’s watchdogs can live up to their ambitions to be the world’s digital policemen.

    Ireland’s privacy regulator wants to know whether the company’s data protection standards are good enough. The European Commission doesn’t know who to ask about its upcoming online content rules. The bloc’s cybersecurity agencies raise concerns about an increase in online trolls and potential security risks.

    Twitter’s unfolding turmoil is precisely the regulatory challenge that Brussels has said it wants to take on. The 27-country bloc has positioned itself — via a flurry of privacy, content and digital competition rules — as the de facto enforcer for the Western world, expanding its digital rulebook beyond the EU’s borders and urging other countries to follow its lead.

    Now, the world’s richest man is putting those enforcement powers to the test. 

    Europe’s regulators have the largest collective rulebook to throw at companies suspected of potential breaches. But a lack of willingness to act quickly — combined with the internal confusion engulfing Twitter — has so far hamstrung the bloc’s enforcement role when it comes to holding Musk to Europe’s standards, according to eight EU and national government officials, speaking privately to POLITICO. 

    “This will be a major test for European regulators,” said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics at George Washington University. She is part of the advisory board of the European Digital Media Observatory, a group helping to shape the EU’s online content rulebook, known as the Digital Services Act (DSA).

    “If Musk continues to act with intransigence, I think there’s an opportunity for European regulators to move much more quickly than normal,” she added. “These regulators will certainly be motivated to act.”

    A representative for Twitter did not return requests for comment.

    Regulatory firepower

    The bloc certainly has the firepower to bring Twitter to heel.

    Under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, companies can be fined up to 4 percent of their annual global revenue for failing to keep people’s personal information safe. The Irish regulator, which has responsibility for enforcing these rules against Twitter because the company’s EU headquarters are in Dublin, has already doled out a €450,000 penalty for the firm’s inability to keep data safe.

    As part of the bloc’s upcoming content rules, which will start to be enforced next year, the Commission will have powers to levy separate fines of up to 6 percent of a company’s yearly revenue if it does not take down illegal content. Brussels also has the right to ban a platform from operating in the EU after repeated serious violations.

    “In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules,” Thierry Breton, the French commissioner, told Musk — via Twitter | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty images

    Thierry Breton, the European internal market commissioner, reminded Musk of Twitter’s obligations under the bloc’s upcoming content rules in a call with the billionaire soon after his acquisition of the social network. Musk pledged to uphold those rules, even as he has pushed back at other content moderation practices that could hamper people’s freedom of expression on the platform.

    “In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules,” Breton, the French commissioner, told Musk — via Twitter.

    Yet over the last three weeks, European regulators and policymakers have struggled to navigate Twitter’s internal turmoil, according to four EU and national officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

    The likes of Damien Kieran, Twitter’s chief privacy officer in charge of complying with Europe’s tough data protection standards, and Stephen Turner, the company’s chief lobbyist in Brussels, were among scores of senior officials who left since Musk took over.

    Two of the EU officials, speaking about internal discussions on condition of anonymity, told POLITICO that multiple emails to Twitter executives bounced back after those individuals were laid off. One of those policymakers said he had taken to Twitter — scrolling through the scores of posts from the company’s employees announcing their departures — in search of information about who was still working there. A third official said the current confusion could prove problematic when the company had to reveal long-guarded information about the number of its EU users early next year. 

    Others have been fostering wider connections within the company, just in case. Arcom, France’s online platform regulator, for instance, has built ties with high-level executives outside of France and still had a contact in Dublin at the company to answer its pressing questions.

    The policymaking blackholes — fueled by mass layoffs — have been felt beyond the EU. 

    Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety commissioner who previously ran Twitter’s public policy team in Asia, told POLITICO she had written to the company last week to remind them about its obligations to clamp down on child sexual exploitation on the platform. She had yet to hear back from Musk or other senior officials.

    “We did have a meeting on the books with Twitter,” Melanie Dawes, chief executive of Ofcom, the U.K.’s communications regulator, told POLITICO ahead of her trip to Silicon Valley this week to meet many of the social media companies. “It was canceled.”

    What about privacy?

    Another open question is how Twitter with comply with Europe’s tough privacy rules.

    Although the company’s chief privacy executive had been fired — and rumors swirled Twitter could pull out of Ireland in its cost-saving push — the Irish Data Protection Commission told POLITICO it had yet to open an investigation into the firm.

    A spokesman for the agency said Twitter executives had assured Irish regulators on Monday that Renato Monteiro had been appointed as the company’s acting data protection officer — because it’s a legal requirement to have one — and no changes to how Twitter handled data had been made.  

    A data protection official said it was likely that Musk would move such decision-making powers to his inner circle in the United States | Justin Sullivan/Getty images

    A key unanswered question is whether, in the wake of the mass layoffs, Twitter’s operations in Dublin are either shuttered or cut back to an extent that regulatory decisions are made in California and not Ireland.

    Such a change would lead the company to fall foul of strict provisions within Europe’s privacy regime that require legal oversight of EU citizens’ data to be made in a firm’s headquarters within the 27-country bloc.

    A data protection official, who asked to remain anonymous to speak candidly, said it was likely that Musk would move such decision-making powers to his inner circle in the United States. That potential pullback could allow any European regulator — and not just the Irish agency — to go after Twitter for potential privacy violations under the bloc’s data protection regime, the official added.

    This story has been corrected to specify how multiple European privacy regulators may target Twitter for breaching the bloc’s rules if the company pulls out of Ireland.

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    Mark Scott, Vincent Manancourt, Laura Kayali, Clothilde Goujard and Louis Westendarp

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  • YourEncore® Joins AARP® Employer Pledge Program

    YourEncore® Joins AARP® Employer Pledge Program

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    National effort helps employers solve staffing challenges, directs job seekers to employers that value and hire experience

    Press Release
    –


    updated: Jun 12, 2017


    Indianapolis, IN, June 12, 2017 (Newswire.com)
    –
    ​​​​​​​​​​YourEncore, a leading provider of world-class expertise for flexible resourcing and consulting engagements to life sciences and consumer goods companies, has joined more than 450 organizations in signing the AARP Employer Pledge, confirming their commitment to hiring across the age spectrum and leveraging the value that experienced workers bring to companies of all sizes.

    “YourEncore was founded on the core principle that experience matters,” said Mike Lewis, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer at YourEncore. “Our mission is to put experience to work. We offer clients the opportunity to tap into the most accomplished and experienced community of experts in the world, and we offer our talent community, or YourEncore Experts as we call them, the opportunity to use their experience to make a lasting difference. We are excited to join with AARP in its mission to drive awareness of the wisdom, experience, and technical skill of accomplished business professionals.”

    “YourEncore was founded on the core principle that experience matters. We are excited to join with AARP in its mission to drive awareness of the wisdom, experience, and technical skill of accomplished business professionals. We’re passionate about creating the workforce of the future…one that is ageless, inspires and engages talent, and accelerates business performance. We look forward to working with AARP on this all-important journey.”

    Mike Lewis, YourEncore Chief Sales & Marketing Officer

    Employers are facing a chasm of wisdom, experience, and absolute talent supply that places achievement of their business objectives at risk. Over 10,000 Baby Boomers retire every day. While Millennials currently provide the workforce with a large infusion of talent, their numbers alone are still not enough to stem the tide of departing Boomers1. This talent gap cannot be closed with traditional employment models. Given the seismic shifts taking place in today’s workforce, companies need to think differently about how they utilize talent, and individuals need to think differently about how they approach work. YourEncore is uniquely positioned to provide both groups with the solutions they need to successfully navigate and take advantage of this perfect storm that is today’s economy.

    YourEncore combines cutting-edge technology and high-touch personal engagement to build robust, vibrant talent communities, match talent to business requirements, and create tailored talent solutions that allow clients to transform and grow and Experts to realize their personal and professional goals.

    Although some Boomers are stepping away from traditional full-time, career-focused employment, many want to continue working, for a host of reasons from social to professional to financial2. YourEncore is a leader in mobilizing this “encore workforce” and has helped thousands of Experts build successful consulting careers through rewarding project work and professional development.

    For clients, YourEncore deploys world class expertise from their Expert Network to solve complex problems, support critical initiatives, and fill capability and capacity gaps. Experts are hand-picked and matched for subject matter expertise and business acumen. They are alumni from some of the best companies in the world, average over 25 years of experience, and the majority hold advanced degrees. The power of that experience – which the AARP Employer Pledge Program is designed to elevate – is the impetus behind the founding and on-going growth of YourEncore.

    “We’re passionate about creating the workforce of the future…one that is ageless, inspires and engages talent, and accelerates business performance,” said Lewis. “We look forward to working with AARP on this all-important journey.”

    About YourEncore®: YourEncore is a leading provider of proven expertise, delivering flexible resourcing and consulting services to the biopharma, medical devices and diagnostics, and consumer goods industries. YourEncore mobilizes the wisdom and knowledge of highly experienced, immediately effective Experts to help companies outthink, outpace, and outperform. Based in Indianapolis, IN, with offices in Cincinnati, OH and Princeton, NJ, YourEncore was named a “100 Most Brilliant Company” by Entrepreneur Magazine. For more information, visit yourencore.com and follow us on Facebook @YourEncore, Twitter @YourEncoreInc, and LinkedIn.

    1https://www.conference-board.org/laborshortages/

    2https://www.transamericacenter.org/docs/default-source/retirement-survey-of-workers/tcrs2016_sr_perspectives_on_retirement_baby_boomers_genx_millennials.pdf

    Media Contacts:

    Mike Lewis 609.216.7903 mike.lewis@yourencore.com

    Nancy Reilly 513.609.4516 nancy.reilly@yourencore.com

    Source: YourEncore, Inc.

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