Zylox-Tonbridge, a Hong Kong-listed company specialising in neurovascular and peripheral vascular interventional products, has agreed to acquire German medical technology company Optimed.
Under the agreement, Zylox-Tonbridge will acquire Optimed’s equity interest in multiple steps, with an option to purchase the entire shareholding from current owners.
Optimed focuses on the research, development, production, and distribution of devices for minimally invasive therapies globally.
Optimed has been in operation for nearly 30 years, establishing a sales and service network that extends to more than 70 countries.
The company offers a range of products in the peripheral venous stenting segment, including devices designed for the iliofemoral veins, vena cava, and iliac bifurcation.
Clinical evidence for its venous stents includes data from trials such as sinus-Venous and STEVECO, the first prospective, multicentre, randomised study in chronic deep venous obstruction.
Results from these trials indicated improvements in quality of life and clinical severity compared to conservative treatment.
Zylox-Tonbridge’s acquisition of Optimed is designed to accelerate global expansion by creating a unified platform that spans research and development, manufacturing, and commercialisation.
By integrating both companies’ sales networks and leveraging Optimed’s established relationships with European clinical experts, Zylox-Tonbridge aims to bring products to market more efficiently and extend its international reach.
The partnership is expected to deliver operational synergies through an expanded manufacturing base in Germany. This will support a reliable supply of medical solutions for European and global markets.
After completion of the transaction, Zylox-Tonbridge will merge its sales, marketing, and customer service teams with those of Optimed to establish a unified global commercial organisation.
Rüdiger Hausherr will continue as CEO of Optimed and report to Dr Jonathon Zhong Zhao, chairman and CEO of Zylox-Tonbridge.
Zhao said: “This acquisition marks an important milestone in Zylox-Tonbridge’s global strategy, enabling the company to leverage a broader European-based platform to accelerate its global expansion.
“We are very pleased to welcome Optimed to the Zylox-Tonbridge Group and look forward to combining our complementary product portfolios and manufacturing platforms to bring high-quality, innovative and affordable solutions to more patients and physicians worldwide, while driving the company’s next phase of growth.”
“Zylox-Tonbridge to acquire German medical technology company Optimed” was originally created and published by Medical Device Network, a GlobalData owned brand.
The name change reflects the company’s continued commitment to cybersecurity, xG technology, testbed development, and custom software solutions for government agencies and industry.
ARLINGTON, Va., February 13, 2025 (Newswire.com)
– Kryptowire Labs is officially changing its name to A2 Labs, LLC. While the name is new, the company remains the same-offering the same expertise, leadership, and commitment to innovation that clients and partners have trusted for years.
A2 Labs continues to specialize in cybersecurity, xG innovation, testbed development, and custom software solutions for government agencies and industry. The name change reflects continuity, not change, reinforcing the company’s long-standing dedication to providing mission-critical technology solutions.
Same Mission, New Name
“We are excited to officially operate under our new name, A2 Labs,” said Angelos Stavrou, President and Founder of A2 Labs. “This is a true name change, not a rebranding or shift in direction. Our mission remains the same-to deliver cutting-edge technology solutions that support government agencies, industry partners, and their most critical initiatives.”
The transition also distinguishes A2 Labs from Kryptowire Inc., which spun out in 2021 and now operates independently as Quokka. Quokka focuses on enterprise mobile security and privacy solutions for apps and devices, expanding on its expertise in protecting mobile ecosystems.
What This Means for Clients and Partners
For government agencies, industry partners, and collaborators, the name change has no impact on existing operations, contracts, or relationships. A2 Labs remains the same company with the same team, expertise, and commitment to innovation.
About A2 Labs, LLC
A2 Labs, LLC (formerly Kryptowire Labs) is a leading provider of cybersecurity, xG technology, testbeds, and custom software solutions for government agencies and industry. With a legacy of research excellence and mission-driven innovation, A2 Labs continues to empower organizations with cutting-edge technology solutions. To learn more, visit www.a2labs.com.
The American Group of Innovative Learning Environments (AGILE) Network offers a centralized infrastructure for research, development, and evaluation.
KANSAS CITY, Mo., June 25, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– Research nonprofit Leanlab Education launched the American Group of Innovative Learning Environments (AGILE) Network at ISTELive24 with members from learning environments across the country, including school systems, teachers, and non-traditional learning environments. Comprised of education communities on the cutting edge of innovation, the AGILE Network works to accelerate the pace of education research and development (R&D), while elevating historically underrepresented educator and student perspectives.
By leveraging a centralized infrastructure that facilitates “matching” between R&D opportunities—development of emerging technologies and research studies—and participating schools and educators, the AGILE Network aims to become a critical piece of American education R&D infrastructure, designed to keep pace with rapid development cycles in the private sector.
Member schools and educators influence the development and evaluation of emerging education solutions, including curriculum and technology—addressing a well-documented evidence shortage in the market. Studies in the 2024-2025 school year will cover topics including generative AI, literacy, assessment, and mathematical reasoning.
The AGILE Network represents the diversity of learning experiences in the United States, welcoming public districts, charter schools, independent schools, non-traditional environments like micro-schools, and individual educators. To combat existing inequities in education R&D, members have been intentionally assembled to prioritize historically marginalized learner communities. Twenty learning environments are joining the 2024-2025 cohort, including:
Academy for Integrated Arts (Missouri)
Allegiance STEAM Academy (California)
Astra Nova Schools (National)
Catalyst Schools (Illinois)
Distinctive Schools (Illinois)
Ednovate (California)
Limestone Community School (Kansas)
Milpitas Unified School District (California)
Oak Ridge Schools (Tennessee)
Prisma Online School (National)
Of the new network, Leanlab Education Founder and CEO Katie Boody Adorno shared, “The AGILE Network will reduce barriers to engage school communities in the co-development and co-design of emerging technologies with researchers. By systematically elevating school community perspectives, we believe we will accelerate the pace of breakthroughs in the field of teaching and learning.”
Following the kickoff convening, Kevin Nham from Ednovate remarked, “I’m looking forward to partnering with edtech companies to develop tools that will truly impact student achievement.” Catalyst Schools’ Nick Tomasso added, “I’m excited about opportunities to grow in my own practice by collaborating with like-minded educators.”
The AGILE Network is a collective action initiative and builds on a decade of Leanlab Education’s leadership bringing together learning communities and education technology companies to co-design, co-develop, and study education innovations. The AGILE Network framework was developed through a planning grant with InnovateEDU and the Center for Education Market Dynamics (CEMD) and is based on the guiding Tenets and Principles published by the Global Edtech Trialing Network.
Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF), the world’s first Advanced Inclusive R&D organization dedicated to scientific discovery and invention for PreK-12 education, is a founding partner, contributing essential R&D infrastructure expertise, resources, and advanced R&D projects currently seeking breakthroughs in reading, executive function and math, and assessment. “The AGILE Network serves a critical need to enable education R&D to actually be inclusive and done with educators,” said Chris Liang-Vergara, Chief Learning Officer at AERDF.
Digital Promise and ISTE are contributing network partners, nominating qualifying educators and school districts, and supporting inclusive innovation convenings. Initial funding was provided by the Siegel Family Endowment and Walton Family Foundation, among others. Education, nonprofit, and supporting partners are expected to increase following the pilot year of the network.
“Digital Promise is committed to partnering with school districts and communities to co-design and co-research innovative solutions that address the strengths and needs of historically and systematically excluded learners. We’re excited to expand this work as founding partners in the AGILE Network.” – Jenny Bradbury, Digital Promise
“I am excited for ISTE to support more educators in having the value of their experience realized and recognized by edtech vendors and researchers. By reducing the barrier and time for R&D, we can foster a more collaborative, inclusive, and impactful innovation process. With ISTE’s own research team contributing to and benefiting from the network, we are poised to create more effective solutions that truly stand to elevate the sector as a whole.” – Tal Havivi, ISTE
“Market data is a critical input to decision making, contributing to informed research priorities and the measurement of scaling solutions. CEMD is pleased to support the development of the AGILE Network and committed to providing network leaders with market insights that give context to edtech materials and support informed decision making.“ – Lora Kaiser, Center for Education Market Dynamics
About Leanlab Education
Leanlab Education is a nonprofit organization that specializes in codesign research between education technology companies and K12 learning communities. Leanlab CEO Katie Boody Adorno is a co-founder of the Global EdTech Trialing Network.
Nearly 17,000 people may have died after taking hydroxycholoroquine during the first wave of COVID, according to a study by French researchers.
The anti-malaria drug was prescribed to some patients hospitalized with COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic, “despite the absence of evidence documenting its clinical benefits,” the researchers point out in their paper, published in the February issue of Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy.
Now, researchers have estimated that some 16,990 people in six countries — France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the U.S. — may have died as a result.
That figure stems from a study published in the Nature scientific journal in 2021 which reported an 11 percent increase in the mortality rate, linked to its prescription against COVID-19, because of the potential adverse effects like heart rhythm disorders, and its use instead of other effective treatments.
Researchers from universities in Lyon, France, and Québec, Canada, used that figure to analyze hospitalization data for COVID in each of the six countries, exposure to hydroxychloroquine and the increase in the relative risk of death linked to the drug.
In fact, they say the figure may be far higher given the study only concerns six countries from March to July 2020, when the drug was prescribed much more widely.
Hydroxychloroquine gained prominence partly due to French virologist Didier Raoult who had headed the Méditerranée Infection Foundation hospital, but was later removed amid growing controversy.
It was also considered something of a “miracle cure” by the then-U.S. President Donald Trump, who said: “What do you have to lose? Take it.”
BEIJING (Reuters) -Nissan Motor said on Sunday it would sell China-developed electric vehicles (EVs) globally as it struck a deal with the country’s top university to leverage local resources to accelerate research and development on electrification.
The Japanese automaker is considering exporting the line-up of existing internal combustion engine vehicles and upcoming pure electric and plug-in hybrid cars manufactured and developed in China to overseas markets, Masashi Matsuyama, vice president of Nissan Motor and president of Nissan China, told reporters in Beijing.
Nissan is considering aiming at the same markets as Chinese rivals such as BYD, he said.
The company is joining foreign brands including Tesla, BMW and Ford that are expanding their exports of China-made cars to exploit the country’s lower manufacturing costs and increase the capacity utilisation of their factories.
China accounted for just over a fifth of Nissan’s worldwide sales of about 2.8 million vehicles over the first 10 months of the year, down from over a third for the same period last year.
Japanese automakers have faced a severe sales challenge this year in China, the world’s biggest auto market, due to the popularity of domestic brands and heavy price competition amid a rapid shift to EVs.
Nissan announced it would establish a joint research centre with China’s leading Tsinghua University next year, focussing on research and development of EVs, including charging infrastructure and battery recycling.
“We hope that this collaboration will help us gain a deeper understanding of the Chinese market and develop strategies that better meet the needs of customers in China,” Nissan President and Chief Executive Makoto Uchida said in a statement.
The launch of the research centre is an extension of joint research efforts the company has had with Tsinghua since in 2016 that focussed on intelligent mobility and autonomous driving technology.
(Reporting by Zhang Yan in Beijing and Daniel Leussink in Tokyo; Editing by Antoni Slodkowski and William Mallard)
Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman have been awarded the Nobel prize in medicine for their work on messenger RNA technology, which enabled the development ofthe first vaccines against COVID-19.
The Nobel Assembly at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, which is responsible for selecting the winner of one of science’s most prestigious prizes, said on Monday that the discoveries “were critical for developing effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.”
mRNA vaccines work by delivering into the body genetic instructions for building proteins that are present in the virus being immunized against. That spurs cells to create those proteins, which the body then recognizes as foreign and attacks; training the immune system and creating protection against the actual virus.
In the early 1990s, Karikó, from Hungary, was working at the University of Pennsylvania looking at how mRNA could be used in medicine. She was joined in her research by U.S. colleague Weissman, an immunologist specializing in dendritic cells, which are responsible for the body’s immune response during vaccination.
Together, the scientists discovered how to alter mRNA so that it wasn’t immediately detected by the body’s immune system and could deliver its payload to the target cells. Further work by the pairimproved the efficiency of mRNA, so that it stimulated more protein production.
“Through their discoveries that base modifications both reduced inflammatory responses and increased protein production, Karikó and Weissman had eliminated critical obstacles on the way to clinical applications of mRNA,” said the Nobel Assembly.
As well as laying the groundwork for mRNA vaccines, Karikó was employed from 2013 to 2022 at vaccine developer BioNTech, which, together with Pfizer, produced the first COVID-19 vaccine approved in the EU.
Pharma companies are now developing mRNA vaccines and therapies for a swathe of different diseases including flu, tuberculosis, HIV, malaria, Lyme disease, Zika and various types of cancer.
The award comes with a cash prize of 11 million Swedish krona (€950,000). In 1951, Max Theiler won the prize for his work helping discover the vaccine against yellow fever.
In the early morning of the last day of August, Parisians experienced for the first time a practice normally confined to tropical regions — authorities fumigating the city against the tiger mosquito. The event was a tangible confirmation of what public health stats already showed: Dengue, the deadly mosquito-borne disease, had well and truly arrived in Europe.
In 2022, Europe saw more cases of locally acquired dengue than in the whole of the previous decade. The rise marks both a public health threat and a corresponding market opportunity for dengue vaccines and treatments; news that should spur the pharma industry to boost investment into the neglected disease.
On the face of it, this shift would appear to benefit not only countries like France but also nations like Bangladesh and the Philippines that have long battled dengue.
But that assumption could be fatally flawed, experts told POLITICO.
People working in the field say the rise of dengue in the West could, in fact, make it harder to get lifesaving drugs to those who need them most, because pharma companies develop tools that are less effective in countries where the dengue burden is the highest or because wealthy nations end up hoarding these medicines and vaccines.
“It might look like a good thing — and it is a good thing — that we’re getting more products developed, but does it then create a two-tier system where high-income populations get access to it and then we still have the access gap for low- and middle- income countries?” asked Lindsay Keir, director of the science and policy advisory team at think tank Policy Cures Research.
Killer invading mosquitoes
Climate change and migration mean the mosquitoes that transmit dengue, as well as other diseases such as chikungunya and Zika, are setting up shop in Europe. The most recent annual data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control shows that, in 2022, Europe saw 71 cases of locally acquired dengue: 65 in France and six in Spain.
While dengue usually results in mild or no symptoms, it can also lead to high fever, severe headache and vomiting. Severe dengue can cause bleeding from the gums, abdominal pain and, in some cases, death.
So far, the mosquito has mostly been confined to Southern Europe but it’s a worry across the Continent. In Belgium, the national public health research institute Sciensano has even launched an app where members of the public can submit photos of any Asian tiger mosquitos they spot.
The diseases spread by these mosquitoes have traditionally fallen under the umbrella of neglected tropical diseases, a group of infections that affect mainly low-income countries and struggle to attract research and development investment. But this is changing.
Policy Cures Research, which publishes an annual report on R&D investment into neglected diseases, removed dengue vaccines from their assessment in 2013. Dengue was no longer seen as an area where there was market failure, due to the emergence of a market that the private sector could tap into.
The organization is still tracking dengue drugs and biologics and their 2022 analysis showed a 33 percent increase in funding for research into non-vaccine products compared to the previous year, with industry investment reaching a record high of $28 million.
Climate change and migration mean the mosquitoes that transmit dengue, as well as other diseases such as chikungunya and Zika, are setting up shop in Europe | Lukas Schulze/Getty Images
Sibilia Quilici, executive director of the vaccine maker lobby group Vaccines Europe, said the most recent pipeline review of members found that roughly 10 percent were targeting neglected diseases. There is more R&D happening in this area, said Quilici.
Across the major drugmakers, J&J is working on a dengue antiviral treatment and MSD has a dengue vaccine in their pipeline, while Sanofi has a second yellow fever jab in development. Two dengue vaccines are already approved in the EU — one from Sanofi and another from Takeda. Moderna recently told POLITICO that it is looking closely at a dengue vaccine candidate and it already has a Zika candidate in the works.
For the few, not the many
But just because there might soon be larger markets for Big Pharma doesn’t mean the products will be suitable for the populations that have been waiting years for these tools.
Rachael Crockett, senior policy advocacy manager at the non-profit Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), said increased pharma investment in a particular disease won’t necessarily lead to products developed that are globally relevant. “Industry will — and governments are also more likely to — focus on prevention,” she said.
That means tools such as vaccines will be prioritized; but in countries where dengue is endemic, the rainy season completely overburdens their health systems and what they desperately need are treatments, said Crockett.
She also said a massive increase in investment without a structure to ensure access to resulting products means “we have absolutely no guarantee that there isn’t going to be hoarding, [that] there isn’t going to be high prices.” Case in point: The U.S. national stockpile of Ebola vaccines, which exists despite there never having been an Ebola outbreak in the country.
But just because there might soon be larger markets for Big Pharma doesn’t mean the products will be suitable for the populations that have been waiting years for these tools | Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images
Underlying many of these fears are the mistakes of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw countries with less cash and political heft at the back of the queue when it came to vaccines.
Lisa Goerlitz, head of German charity Deutsche Stiftung Weltbevölkerung (DSW)’s Brussels office, warned if drug development picks up because of a growing market in high-income countries, then accessibility, affordability and other criteria that make it suitable for low resource settings might not be prioritized.
Vaccines Europe’s Quilici sought to allay these concerns, pointing to the pharma industry’s Berlin Declaration, a proposal to reserve an allocation of real-time production of vaccines in a health crisis. Quilici said this was a “really strong commitment …which comes right from the lessons learnt from COVID-19 and which could definitely overcome the challenges we had during the pandemic, if it is taken seriously.”
CORRECTION: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Lisa Goerlitz.
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.
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.
NEW DELHI — British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak raised “very strong concerns” with Beijing about China’s alleged interference in the U.K. parliament.
Sunak relayed his concerns to Chinese Premier Li Qiang at the G20 summit in India following the arrest of a purported Chinese spy working in the parliament.
Sunak told broadcasters in New Delhi that he expressed “very strong concerns about any interference in our parliamentary democracy, which is obviously unacceptable.”
He added that his meeting with Li in the margins of the G20 gathering was an example of the benefits of engagement rather than “shouting from the sidelines.”
“We discussed a range of things and I raised areas where there are disagreements,” Sunak said. “And this is just part of our strategy to protect ourselves, protect our values and our interests, to align our approach to China with that of our allies like America, Australia, Canada, Japan and others, but also to engage where it makes sense,” he said.
The Sunday Times reported that a parliamentary researcher with links to several senior Tory MPs, including the foreign affairs committee chair Alicia Kearns, was arrested under the Official Secrets Act.
The researcher was arrested along with another man on March 13. Officers from the Metropolitan police’s counterterrorism command, which covers espionage, are investigating, the paper said.
The researcher, in his 20s, was arrested in Edinburgh and the second man, who is in his 30s, was detained in Oxfordshire, according to the report. Police also carried out checks at an address in east London. Both men were held at a south London police station before being bailed until a date in early October.
The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, which has pressed the U.K. government for a more hawkish stance toward Beijing, said it was “appalled at reports of the infiltration of the U.K. parliament by someone allegedly acting on behalf of the People’s Republic of China.”
Kearns declined to comment but said on social media: “While I recognize the public interest, we all have a duty to ensure any work of the authorities is not jeopardized.” A person close to her told the PA news agency: “It is inevitable the Chinese Communist Party would target and seek to undermine parliament’s leading voices who have demonstrated the ability to constrain the CCP’s ambitions.”
The researcher also had links to security minister Tom Tugendhat, but is said to have had no contact since Tugendhat took on that role, according to the Sunday Times report.
At the end of August, James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, visited Beijing amid criticism from hawkish Tory MPs.
Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith said U.K. institutions were “deeply penetrated by the Chinese,” and that the government was “so desperately thinking about China as a business problem, they fail to realize how dangerously threatening China really is becoming.”
A meeting between Sunak and Li at the margins of the G20 had been discussed in the run-up to the summit, as POLITICO reported, but it was not confirmed until Sunday morning.
According to Chinese state-controlled news agency Xinhua, Li told Sunak that the U.K. and China should properly handle disagreements and respect each other’s interests and concerns.
Speedy implementation of a combination of measures such as face masks, lockdowns and international border controls, “unequivocally” reduced COVID-19 infections, a major review has shown.
The report published Thursday by the Royal Society looked at findings from six evidence reviews that analyzed thousands of studies to assess the effect of masks, social distancing and lockdowns, test trace and isolate systems, border controls, environmental controls and communications. It found evidence that each of these measures — which are called “non-pharmaceutical interventions” — were effective, albeit to varying degrees, when looked at individually. However, the evidence in favor of using these tools was stronger when countries combined several measures.
The report could have significant implications for decision-making in future outbreaks, with Mark Walport, chair of the report’s expert working group and foreign secretary of the Royal Society, saying that “having protocols in advance is really important.” He said what policymakers should take from the research is “there is evidence that non-pharmaceutical interventions are effective, but … they have to be applied as packages, and they have to be applied as early as possible.”
The most effective measure, according to the review, was one of the most controversial — restrictions on movement and social interactions through lockdowns, distancing and rules around the size of gatherings. These were repeatedly found to be associated with a “significant reduction” in transmission of the virus, with the more stringent the measure, the greater the effect.
For masks, 75 studies were assessed, with 63 of these finding positive effects. Unlike the January Cochrane review, which only looked at randomized controlled trials, this review also included observational studies. The Cochrane review was unable to find conclusive evidence that masks helped stop respiratory viruses.
Chris Dye, professor of epidemiology at the University of Oxford, who led the review on masks for the Royal Society, said if they had only looked at randomized controlled trials they would have come to the same conclusion as the Cochrane review. But the researchers behind the paper released Thursday chose to analyze a larger body of studies and found strong evidence that masks work.
A key finding from the research was these type of measures were most effective when implemented early on. Dye said that while there is a 100-day mission to develop drugs, therapeutics, vaccines and diagnostics for a future pandemic, “it would be marvelous” if there were a 100-day vision for non-pharmaceutical interventions. He said this would mean countries could “put in place the necessary mechanisms for preparedness, which would be to implement [non-pharmaceutical interventions] when some unknown new pathogen comes along.”
While a future pandemic could be transmitted sexually or gastrointestinally, Salim Abdool Karim, a member of the working group on the report and pro-vice-chancellor for research at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said the biggest concern was a respiratory virus. “The lessons of SARS-CoV-2 have to feature in our thinking as we prepare for a next pandemic that would be a respiratory virus of which we’ve got no prior exposure and so we don’t have a pre-existing immunity. The lessons of this report are going to feature strongly in anyone’s deliberations,” he said.
However, responding to the report, Kevin McConway, emeritus professor of applied statistics at the Open University cautioned that impact on virus transmission is not the only factor that should be taken into account when deciding to use such measures. “The report does point out explicitly that NPIs can impose a great number of costs and burdens, in terms social and economic impacts, and indeed of increasing ill health … but makes it very explicit that this piece of work isn’t going to consider any of that.” “I think that limits quite severely its effectiveness in helping decisions on what should be done in the next pandemic, whenever it arises.”
The pictures posted on the Chinese company’s website show a tall, Caucasian man with a crew cut and flattened nose inspecting body armor at its factory.
“This spring, one of our customers came to our company to confirm the style and quantity of bulletproof vests, and carefully tested the quality of our vests,” Shanghai H Win, a manufacturer of military-grade protective gear, proudly reported on its website in March. The customer “immediately directly confirmed the order quantity of bulletproof vests and subsequent purchase intention.”
The identity of the smiling customer isn’t clear, but there’s a fair chance he was Russian: According to customs records obtained by POLITICO, Russian buyers have declared orders for hundreds of thousands of bulletproof vests and helmets made by Shanghai H Win — the items listed in the documents match those in the company’s online catalog.
Evidence of this kind shows that China, despite Beijing’s calls for peace, is pushing right up to a red line in delivering enough nonlethal, but militarily useful, equipment to Russia to have a material impact on President Vladimir Putin’s 17-month-old war on Ukraine. The protective gear would be sufficient to equip many of the men mobilized by Russia since the invasion. Then there are drones that can be used to direct artillery fire or drop grenades, and thermal optical sights to target the enemy at night.
These shipments point to a China-sized loophole in the West’s attempts to hobble Putin’s war machine. The sale of so-called dual-use technology that can have both civilian and military uses leaves just enough deniability for Western authorities looking for reasons not to confront a huge economic power like Beijing.
The wartime strength of China’s exports of dual-use products to Russia is confirmed by customs data. And, while Ukraine is a customer of China too, its imports of most of the equipment covered in this story have fallen sharply, the figures show.
Russia has imported more than $100 million-worth of drones from China so far this year — 30 times more than Ukraine. And Chinese exports of ceramics, a component used in body armor, increased by 69 percent to Russia to more than $225 million, while dropping by 61 percent to Ukraine to a mere $5 million, Chinese and Ukrainian customs data show.
“What is very clear is that China, for all its claims that it is a neutral actor, is in fact supporting Russia’s positions in this war,” said Helena Legarda, a lead analyst specializing in Chinese defense and foreign policy at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, a Berlin think tank.
Were China to cross the red line and sell weapons or military equipment to Russia, Legarda said she would expect the EU to enforce secondary sanctions targeting enablers of Putin’s war of aggression.
But, she added, equipment like body armor, thermal imaging, and even commercial drones that can be used in offensive frontline operations are unlikely to trigger a response.
“Then there’s this situation that we’re in at the moment — all these dual-use components or equipment and how you handle those,” Legarda explained. “I would not expect the EU to be able to agree to sanctions on that.”
Disappearing customer
Shanghai H Win, like other Chinese companies producing dual-use equipment, has enjoyed a surge in business since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
According to customs records obtained by POLITICO, Russia has ordered hundreds of thousands of bulletproof vests and helmets made by Shanghai H Win | Genya Savilov/AFP via Getty Images
“Because of the war, a lot of trading companies are looking for us and ask: ‘Are you making this kind of vest?’ We received a lot of inquiries,” a sales representative told POLITICO over the phone.
At first, the representative said Shanghai H Win wasn’t allowed to export directly to Russia unless the Chinese military issues a certificate and it can provide documentary proof of its final customer.
Yet when asked who the man in the pictures was, and where he was from, the representative denied that he was even a customer — even though the website said so.
“He is our customer’s customer. We cannot ask him directly, ‘Where are you from?’ But I guess maybe he is from Europe — maybe Ukraine, maybe Poland, even maybe from Russia. I’m not sure.”
Shortly after the call, Shanghai H Win took down the post featuring the mystery shopper from its website.
Who are the buyers?
So, who exactly are those customers? Evidence of deals — importers, suppliers, and product descriptions — can be found in a registry of declarations of conformity by anyone with access to the Russian internet who is familiar with international customs classifications.
In an earlier story, POLITICO searched these filings and found evidence that sniper bullets made in the United States were reaching Russia, where they were freely available on the black market.
The declarations enable the final buyer to certify that the products are genuine and, in effect, make it possible to import goods without the express consent of the maker. If goods are traded through an intermediary, the maker may not even be aware that its goods are going to Russia. The registry is, however, searchable so it’s still easy to find the ultimate buyers of the Chinese kit.
One is Silva, a company headquartered in the remote Eastern Siberian region of Buryatia. It filed declarations in January of this year detailing orders for 100,000 bulletproof vests and 100,000 helmets. The manufacturer? Shanghai H Win.
Such importers often bear the hallmarks of “one-day” firms, as shell companies are known in Russia, set up by actors who want to conceal their dealings. They tend to be new, listed at obscure residential addresses, and have few staff or assets. Their financial statements often don’t report the levels of turnover that the filings would imply.
According to public records, Silva was registered only last September. It reported zero revenues for 2022. A Google Street View search of its address in Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia, takes visitors to a dilapidated apartment block.
POLITICO tried to contact Silva but the phone number given on its filings rang off the hook and a message sent to its email address bounced.
The sale of so-called dual-use technology that can have both civilian and military uses leaves enough deniability for Western authorities looking for reasons not to confront China | STR/AFP via Getty Images
Another Russian company called Rika declared a smaller shipment of body armor from Shanghai H Win in March. Before that, in January, Rika declared a consignment of helmets from a company called Deekon Shanghai, which shares an address with Shanghai H Win. The two companies are affiliated, another Shanghai H Win representative said.
A woman who answered the phone at Rika said: “We buy in Russia, not in China.” The company didn’t reply to a follow-up email from POLITICO.
The denial is hardly plausible: In addition to the protective gear, a search of declarations by Rika threw up hits for deals for thermal optical equipment from China. That was corroborated by customs data accessed by POLITICO, which revealed more than 220 shipments, worth $11 million, for thermal optics and protective equipment since the outbreak of the war. Rika advertises Chinese-made night sights right at the top of its website.
Another Russian company called Legittelekom, whose homepage reveals it to be a Moscow freight forwarding company, also appears as a buyer of 100,000 items of headgear and 100,000 suits of outerwear from Deekon Shanghai, according to filings dated last November 24.
A man who answered a call to Legittelekom declined to comment on POLITICO’s findings and would not say whether the company supplied the Russian military.
“This is a commercial activity and we do not disclose our commercial activities,” the man said in response to both questions.
Bigger deal
Then there’s Pozitron, a company based in Rostov-on-Don, the southern city briefly captured by warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenaries in their failed uprising last month. It imported more than $60 million-worth of “airsoft helmets,” “miscellaneous ceramics,” and other items from Chinese firm Beijing KRNatural in November and December 2022, according to customs data shared by ImportGenius.
These flows check out with Pozitron’s own declarations of conformity between late October and December 2022, for a total of 100,000 helmets. The declarations also reveal that Pozitron acquired a range of drones from Chinese multinational SZ DJI Technology Co., Ltd last December.
Although the quantity is unclear, the models specified include ones known to have been used in the Ukrainian theater of war, like DJI’s Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced quadcopter or the Mini 2 lightweight drone.
At first sight, the product descriptions in the declarations and customs records appear harmless enough — the “airsoft helmets,” for example, are said to be for use in paintball games and “not for military use, not for dual use.”
Sanctions and defense experts say, however, that it’s common practice to mislabel dual-use goods as being for civilian purposes when they’re in fact destined for the battlefield.
At any rate, Pozitron, which was only founded in March 2021, is having a very good war: Its revenues exploded from 31 million rubles — around $400,000 — in 2021 to 20 billion rubles — almost $300 million — in 2022, according to its financial statement.
Reached by email, Pozitron’s general director, Andrey Vitkovsky, said that his company has “never imported drones and similar products” from the People’s Republic of China.
“The main activity of Pozitron LLC is the purchase and sale of consumer goods, sporting goods, and fabrics, both produced in the Russian Federation and imported from China,” Vitkovsky added, saying that his company’s activities were “exclusively peaceful in nature, in compliance with all rules and restrictions.”
The denial is typical — Russian companies have good reason to fear Western sanctions if they are implicated in trade that supports the Kremlin’s war effort. After POLITICO reported in March that a company called Tekhkrim was importing Chinese assault weapons, and declaring them as “hunting rifles,” the firm was sanctioned by the United States.
Pozitron is on the West’s radar, said one sanctions expert, who was granted anonymity as they are not authorized to speak publicly.
As for Beijing KRNatural, POLITICO was able to trace a company with a similar name at the address given in the Pozitron filings. The company, Beijing Natural Hanhua International Trade Co., Ltd, is listed as a “small and micro enterprise.” It was founded in April 2022, a few months before the Pozitron deals. Nobody answered when POLITICO called.
Heavenly mechanics
In contrast to the bulk consignments of protective gear that appear intended to equip a large fighting force, the orders for drones found by POLITICO are more dispersed among different buyers — both companies and individuals.
In addition to Pozitron, buyers of drones from DJI and its subsidiaries include firms called Gigantshina and Vozdukh — neither of which responded to emailed requests for comment. Another is Nebesnaya Mekhanika (“Heavenly Mechanics”), which before the war was the Chinese company’s official distributor in Russia.
A DJI spokesperson said that the company and its subsidiaries had voluntarily stopped all shipments to, and operations in, Russia and Ukraine on April 26, 2022 — two months after the war broke out.
“We stand alone as the only drone company to clearly denounce and actively discourage use of products in combat,” the spokesperson said in comments emailed to POLITICO.
DJI said it had also broken off its relationship with Nebesnaya Mekhanika, although the Russian company filed further declarations for shipments of the Chinese company’s drones last September 15 and on March 27 of this year.
The spokesperson said that DJI was not in any way involved in the drafting of the declarations of conformity found by POLITICO: “These documents would have been filled out by Russian parties, and they do not indicate in any shape or form who ex- or imported the products that are being declared conform.”
“We have seen media reports and other documents that appear to show how our products are being transported to Russia and Ukraine from other countries where they can be bought off-the-shelf,” the spokesperson added. “However, it is not in our power to influence how our products are being used once they leave our control.”
Still, a search of ImportGenius shows that a Chinese company called Iflight has continued to ship DJI drones to Nebesnaya Mechnika via Hong Kong, care of a local company called Lotos. The most recent consignment was delivered last October 10. In an apparent anomaly, Russia is stated as the country of origin for the shipments.
Nebesnaya Mekhanika, which still advertises DJI drones on its website, did not respond to a request for comment.
Political will
The trafficking of low-tech body armor to high-tech drones and thermal optics highlights a vulnerability in the Western sanctions regime. The ambiguity surrounding the dual-use status of this equipment, coupled with the fact that a significant portion of it is manufactured in China, seems, at least for now, to have placed the possibility of the West taking meaningful action beyond reach.
Then there is the flow of technology through China that may include components made in the West that could be of direct military use.
Russia is fully aware of the China loophole and is using it to buy Western technology to fight its war against Ukraine, according to a recent analysis by the KSE Institute, a think tank affiliated to the Kyiv School of Economics. More than 60 percent of imported critical components in Russian weapons found on the battlefield came from U.S. companies, the researchers found.
It’s an issue that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken brought up on a visit to Beijing last month — the first by Washington’s top diplomat in five years. He told reporters that China had given assurances that “it is not and will not provide lethal assistance to Russia for use in Ukraine.” Blinken, however, expressed “ongoing concerns” that Chinese firms may be providing technology that Russia can use to advance its aggression in Ukraine. “And we have asked the Chinese government to be very vigilant about that.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters that China had given assurances that “it is not and will not provide lethal assistance to Russia for use in Ukraine” during a visit to Beijing last month | Pool photo by Leah Millis/AFP via Getty Images
France is also concerned that China is delivering dual-use equipment to Russia. “There are indications that they are doing things we would prefer them not to do,” Emmanuel Bonne, President Emmanuel Macron’s top diplomatic adviser, told the recent Aspen Security Forum. Pressed on whether China was supplying weapons, Bonne said: “Well, kind of military equipment … as far as we know they are not delivering massively military capacities to Russia but (we need there to be) no delivery.”
Yet there’s little the West can do to twist Beijing’s arm into halting flows of dual-use products into Russia. Only the United States would have the real power to impose an outright ban on dollar-denominated transactions — as Washington did when it sanctioned Iran over its secret nuclear program.
The EU, however, lacks such a strong sanctions weapon because the euro is far less ubiquitous on global markets. It’s also been hesitant to act. In its latest package of Russia sanctions last month, the EU compiled a list of seven Chinese companies that shouldn’t be allowed to trade with the bloc. But, after lobbying by Beijing, Brussels dropped four companies from the blacklist.
Elina Ribakova, one of the authors of the KSE Institute report, said indirect shipments via China pose challenges in terms of both the scope and enforcement of Western sanctions. Secondary sanctions may not be sufficient, she said. She called for manufacturers to be forced to take responsibility for where their products end up — just as banks were required by regulators to step up customer oversight and anti-money laundering operations in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
“What we can do differently is to create the same infrastructure for the corporates,” explained Ribakova, who is director of the international program at the Kyiv School of Economics. “We have to threaten them with serious fines.”
Maxim Mironov, a sanctions expert and assistant professor of finance at the IE Business School in Madrid, reckons that the West, despite expanding sanctions to punish Putin’s helpers, lacks the political conviction to enforce them against Beijing.
“Do politicians have enough will to put sanctions on China? Basically, the answer is no,” said Mironov.
“China signals: You can try, but I don’t care what you are trying to do,” Mironov added. “And the European Union is like: If you don’t like it, we are not going to do it. And if the Chinese see that, they are just going to continue doing what they think is in their best interest.”
The European Commission, the U.S. National Security Council and the Chinese Mission to the EU did not respond to requests for comment.
Stuart Lau contributed reporting.
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Sarah Anne Aarup, Sergey Panov and Douglas Busvine
LONDON — Britain’s tough new plan to police the internet has left politicians in a stand-off with WhatsApp and other popular encrypted messaging services. Deescalating that row will be easier said than done.
The Online Safety Bill, the United Kingdom’s landmark effort to regulate social media giants, gives regulator Ofcom the power to require tech companies to identify child sex abuse material in private messages.
But the proposals have prompted Will Cathcart, boss of the Meta-owned messaging app, whose encrypted service is widely-used in Westminster’s own corridors of power, to claim it would rather be blocked in the U.K. than compromise on privacy.
“The core of what we do is a private messaging service for billions of people around the world,” Cathcart told POLITICO in March when he jetted in to London to lobby ministers over the upcoming bill. “When the U.K., a liberal democracy, says, ‘Oh, it is okay to scan everyone’s private communication for illegal content,’ that emboldens countries around the world that have very different definitions of illegal content to propose the same thing,” he added.
WhatsApp’s smaller rival, Signal, has also said it could stop providing services in the U.K. if the bill requires it to scan messages — echoing claims from the tech industry that date back more than a decade that they can’t create backdoors in encrypted digital services, even to protect kids online, because to do so opens the products up to vulnerabilities from bad actors, including foreign governments.
“We can’t just let thousands of pedophiles get away with it. That wouldn’t be responsible or proportionate for a government to do,” Science and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan told POLITICO in February.
Ministers are keen to lower the temperature. But doing so will prove challenging, two former ministers told POLITICO on the condition of anonymity, given the likelihood of pushback from MPs, the complexity of the technology and the emotiveness of the issue.
Easier said than done
Finding a compromise is unlikely to be easy — and the row mirrors similar debates that are underway in the European Union and Australia over just how accountable tech platforms should be for potentially harmful content on encrypted services.
The debate over whether the requirements of the bill can be met while protecting privacy centers around “client-side scanning.”
While leaders at Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre and security agency GCHQ said last July they believe such technology can simultaneously protect children and privacy, other experts dispute their findings.
A raft of cryptographers criticized the technique in a report called Bugs in Our Pockets in 2021 prompting tech giant Apple to abandon plans to introduce client-side scanning on its services. In Australia, the country’s eSafety Commissioner recently published a report highlighting how the likes of Microsoft and Apple had few, if any, mechanisms to track child sexual abuse material, including via their encrypted services.
“This is not only companies really taking a blind eye to live crime scenes happening on their platforms, but they’re also failing to properly harden their systems and storage against abuse,” Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant told POLITICO. “It’s akin to leaving a home open to an intruder. Once that bad actor is inside the house, good luck getting them out.”
WhatsApp’s smaller rival, Signal, has also said it could stop providing services in the U.K. if the bill requires it to scan messages | Damien Meyer/AFP via Getty Images
Hacking risk
Cybersecurity experts agree the U.K. bill’s demands are incompatible with a desire to protect encryption. They claim that privacy is not a fungible issue — services either have it or they don’t. And they warn that politicians should be wary of undermining such protections in ways that would make people’s online experiences potentially open to abuse or hacking.
“In essence, end-to-end encryption involves not having a door, or if you want to use a postal analogy, not having a sorting office for the state to search. Client-side-scanning, despite the claims of its proponents, does seem to involve some kind of level of access, some kind of ability to sort and scan, and therefore there’s no way of confining that to good use by lawful credible authorities and liberal democracies,” Ciaran Martin, the former chief executive of the government’s National Cyber Security Centre said.
Ministers insist that they support strong encryption and privacy, but say it cannot come at the cost of public safety.
Tech companies should be researching technology to identify child sex abuse before messages are encrypted, Donelan said. But the government also appears to be searching for a way to cool the row, and Donelan insisted the measure would be a “last resort.”
“That element of the bill is like a safety mechanism that can be enacted, should it ever be needed to. It might never be needed because there might be other solutions in place,” she said.
One official in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), not authorized to speak on the record but familiar with government discussions, said DSIT wanted to find a way through and is having talks “with anyone that wants to discuss this with us.”
Melanie Dawes, Ofcom’s chief executive, told POLITICO that any efforts to break encryption in the name of safety would have to meet stringent rules, and such requests would be made in only the most extreme situations.
“There’s a high bar for Ofcom to be able to require the use of a technology in order to secure safety,” she said.
Lords debate
Peers in the unelected House of Lords, the U.K. parliament’s revising chamber, waded into the issue Thursday.
Richard Allan, a Lib Dem peer who was Facebook’s chief lobbyist in Europe until 2019, led the charge, saying tech companies will feel they’re “unable to offer their products in the UK under the bill.” He said undermining encryption opened the doors to hostile states and accused the government of playing a “high stakes game of chicken” with tech companies.
But Beeban Kidron, a crossbench peer who has been leading much of the work in the Lords around child safety, said although she had some sympathy for Allan’s arguments, Big Tech companies had to do more to protect users’ privacy themselves.
Wilf Stevenson, who is managing Labour’s response to the bill in the Lords, said he was not convinced the government’s plans were “right for the present day, let alone the future.” He added that under the bill “Ofcom is expected to be both gamekeeper and poacher,” with power to regulate tech companies and inspect private messages.
But Stephen Parkinson, who is guiding the bill through the Lords on behalf of the government, defended the legislation. “The bill contains strong safeguards for privacy,” he said, echoing Donelan’s statement that powers to inspect messages were a “last resort” designed to be used only in cases of suspected terrorism and child sexual exploitation.
Convincing ministers
Messaging services including Signal and WhatsApp are hoping for a ministerial climbdown — but few see one coming.
There is little prospect of large swathes of MPs, who will have the final say on the bill, riding to their rescue, according to two former ministers who have worked on the legislation.
“People are scared if they go in and fight over this, even for very genuine reasons, it could be very easily portrayed that they’re trying to block protecting kids,” one former Cabinet minister, a party loyalist, who worked on an earlier draft of the bill, said.
The second former minister said MPs “haven’t engaged with it terribly much on a very practical level” because it is “really hard.”
“Tech companies have made significant efforts to frame this issue in the false binary that any legislation that impacts private messaging will damage end-to-end encryption and will mean that encryption will not work or is broken. That argument is completely false,” opposition Labour frontbencher Alex Davies-Jones, said in a debate last June.
The widespread leaking of MPs’ WhatsApp messages has also undermined perceptions of the platform’s privacy credentials, the former Cabinet minister quoted above suggests.
“If you are sharing stuff on WhatsApp with people that’s inappropriate, there’s a good chance it’s going to end up in the public domain anyway. The encryption doesn’t stop that because somebody screenshots it and copies it and sends it on,” they lamented.
WhatsApp does have one ally in the former Brexit secretary and long-time civil liberties campaigner David Davis, though.
“Right across the board there are a whole series of weaknesses the government hasn’t taken on board,” he told POLITICO of the bill.
And on WhatsApp and Signal’s threats to leave the U.K., Davis thinks a point could be made.
“Well, I sort of hope they do. The truth is their model depends on complete privacy,” he said.
Update: This article has been updated to include comments from the latest House of Lords debate on the Online Safety Bill.
Western governments are ticked off with TikTok. The Chinese-owned app loved by teenagers around the world is facing allegations of facilitating espionage, failing to protect personal data, and even of corrupting young minds.
Governments in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and across Europe have moved to ban the use of TikTok on officials’ phones in recent months. If hawks get their way, the app could face further restrictions. The White House has demanded that ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, sell the app or face an outright ban in the U.S.
But do the allegations stack up? Security officials have given few details about why they are moving against TikTok. That may be due to sensitivity around matters of national security, or it may simply indicate that there’s not much substance behind the bluster.
TikTok’s Chief Executive Officer Shou Zi Chew will be questioned in the U.S. Congress on Thursday and can expect politicians from all sides of the spectrum to probe him on TikTok’s dangers. Here are some of the themes they may pick up on:
1. Chinese access to TikTok data
Perhaps the most pressing concern is around the Chinese government’s potential access to troves of data from TikTok’s millions of users.
Western security officials have warned that ByteDance could be subject to China’s national security legislation, particularly the 2017 National Security Law that requires Chinese companies to “support, assist and cooperate” with national intelligence efforts. This law is a blank check for Chinese spy agencies, they say.
TikTok’s user data could also be accessed by the company’s hundreds of Chinese engineers and operations staff, any one of whom could be working for the state, Western officials say. In December 2022, some ByteDance employees in China and the U.S. targeted journalists at Western media outlets using the app (and were later fired).
EU institutions banned their staff from having TikTok on their work phones last month. An internal email sent to staff of the European Data Protection Supervisor, seen by POLITICO, said the move aimed “to reduce the exposure of the Commission from cyberattacks because this application is collecting so much data on mobile devices that could be used to stage an attack on the Commission.”
And the Irish Data Protection Commission, TikTok’s lead privacy regulator in the EU, is set to decide in the next few months if the company unlawfully transferred European users’ data to China.
Skeptics of the security argument say that the Chinese government could simply buy troves of user data from little-regulated brokers. American social media companies like Twitter have had their own problems preserving users’ data from the prying eyes of foreign governments, they note.
TikTok says it has never given data to the Chinese government and would decline if asked to do so. Strictly speaking, ByteDance is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, which TikTok argues would shield it from legal obligations to assist Chinese agencies. ByteDance is owned 20 percent by its founders and Chinese investors, 60 percent by global investors, and 20 percent by employees.
There’s little hope to completely stop European data from going to China | Alex Plavevski/EPA
The company has unveiled two separate plans to safeguard data. In the U.S., Project Texas is a $1.5 billion plan to build a wall between the U.S. subsidiary and its Chinese owners. The €1.2 billion European version, named Project Clover, would move most of TikTok’s European data onto servers in Europe.
Nevertheless, TikTok’s chief European lobbyist Theo Bertram also said in March that it would be “practically extremely difficult” to completely stop European data from going to China.
2. A way in for Chinese spies
If Chinese agencies can’t access TikTok’s data legally, they can just go in through the back door, Western officials allege. China’s cyber-spies are among the best in the world, and their job will be made easier if datasets or digital infrastructure are housed in their home territory.
Dutch intelligence agencies have advised government officials to uninstall apps from countries waging an “offensive cyber program” against the Netherlands — including China, but also Russia, Iran and North Korea.
Critics of the cyber espionage argument refer to a 2021 study by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which found that the app did not exhibit the “overtly malicious behavior” that would be expected of spyware. Still, the director of the lab said researchers lacked information on what happens to TikTok data held in China.
TikTok’s Project Texas and Project Clover include steps to assuage fears of cyber espionage, as well as legal data access. The EU plan would give a European security provider (still to be determined) the power to audit cybersecurity policies and data controls, and to restrict access to some employees. Bertram said this provider could speak with European security agencies and regulators “without us [TikTok] being involved, to give confidence that there’s nothing to hide.”
Bertram also said the company was looking to hire more engineers outside China.
3. Privacy rights
Critics of TikTok have accused the app of mass data collection, particularly in the U.S., where there are no general federal privacy rights for citizens.
In jurisdictions that do have strict privacy laws, TikTok faces widespread allegations of failing to comply with them.
The company is being investigated in Ireland, the U.K. and Canada over its handling of underage users’ data. Watchdogs in the Netherlands, Italy and France have also investigated its privacy practices around personalized advertising and for failing to limit children’s access to its platform.
TikTok has denied accusations leveled in some of the reports and argued that U.S. tech companies are collecting the same large amount of data. Meta, Amazon and others have also been given large fines for violating Europeans’ privacy.
4. Psychological operations
Perhaps the most serious accusation, and certainly the most legally novel one, is that TikTok is part of an all-encompassing Chinese civilizational struggle against the West. Its role: to spread disinformation and stultifying content in young Western minds, sowing division and apathy.
Earlier this month, the director of the U.S. National Security Agency warned that Chinese control of TikTok’s algorithm could allow the government to carry out influence operations among Western populations. TikTok says it has around 300 million active users in Europe and the U.S. The app ranked as the most downloaded in 2022.
A woman watches a video of Egyptian influencer Haneen Hossam | Khaled Desouki/AFP via Getty Images
Reports emerged in 2019 suggesting that TikTok was censoring pro-LGBTQ content and videos mentioning Tiananmen Square. ByteDance has also been accused of pushing inane time-wasting videos to Western children, in contrast to the wholesome educational content served on its Chinese app Douyin.
Besides accusations of deliberate “influence operations,” TikTok has also been criticized for failing to protect children from addiction to its app, dangerous viral challenges, and disinformation. The French regulator said last week that the app was still in the “very early stages” of content moderation. TikTok’s Italian headquarters was raided this week by the consumer protection regulator with the help of Italian law enforcement to investigate how the company protects children from viral challenges.
Researchers at Citizen Lab said that TikTok doesn’t enforce obvious censorship. Other critics of this argument have pointed out that Western-owned platforms have also been manipulated by foreign countries, such as Russia’s campaign on Facebook to influence the 2016 U.S. elections.
TikTok says it has adapted its content moderation since 2019 and regularly releases a transparency report about what it removes. The company has also touted a “transparency center” that opened in the U.S. in July 2020 and one in Ireland in 2022. It has also said it will comply with new EU content moderation rules, the Digital Services Act, which will request that platforms give access to regulators and researchers to their algorithms and data.
Additional reporting by Laura Kayali in Paris, Sue Allan in Ottawa, Brendan Bordelon in Washington, D.C., and Josh Sisco in San Francisco.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has declared Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas “history.”
But others, from senior Ukrainian officials to MEPs and industry insiders, say that chapter of history is still being written.
Significant quantities of Russian hydrocarbons, particularly oil, are still flowing around sanctions and into the European market, they say, earning payments that fund Vladimir Putin’s war machine.
“I had a friend in New York in the 1990s who complained cockroaches would get into his apartment through any available hole — that’s what Russia is doing with its energy,” Oleg Ustenko, economic adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, told POLITICO. “We have to fix these holes to stop Russia receiving this blood money they are using to finance the military machine that is destroying our country and killing our people.”
Crude oil is notoriously difficult to track on global markets. It can easily be mixed or blended with other shipments in transit countries, effectively creating a larger batch of oil whose origins can’t be determined. The refining process, necessary for any practical application, also removes all traces of the feedstock’s origin.
A complex network of shipping companies, carrying the flags of inscrutable offshore jurisdictions, adds a further layer of mystery; some have been accused of helping Russia to hide the origin of its crude exports using a variety of different means.
“Unlike pipeline gas, the oil market is global. Swap and netting systems, and mixing varieties are common practice,” said Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a prominent exiled critic of Putin and the former CEO of oil and gas giant Yukos.
“The result of the embargo is a significant increase in Russian transportation costs, a significant redistribution of income in favor of intermediaries, and some additional discount due to the narrowing of the buyers’ market.”
Crude workarounds?
The EU has largely banned Russian fossil fuels since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with exceptions for limited quantities of pipeline crude oil, pipeline gas, liquefied natural gas (LNG), and oil products.
But large volumes of Russian crude oil — a bigger source of revenue than gas — are still being shipped onto global markets, leading some experts to suspect they are finding their way to Europe’s market through the back door.
“Since the introduction of sanctions, the volumes of crude oil Russia is exporting have remained more or less steady,” said Saad Rahim, chief economist at global commodities trading firm Trafigura. “It’s possible that Russian oil is still being sold on to the EU and Western nations via middlemen.”
Crude oil is notoriously difficult to track on global markets | Image via iStock
One potential route into Europe is through Azerbaijan, which borders Russia and is the starting point of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, operated by BP. The port of Ceyhan, in Turkey, is a major supply hub from which crude oil is shipped to Europe; it also receives large quantities from Iraq through the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline.
François Bellamy, a French MEP and member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, aired suspicions about this route in a recent question to the Commission. Data show that Azerbaijan exported 242,000 barrels a day more than it produced between April and July last year, he said — a large margin over domestic production, which stood at 648,000 barrels a day last month and is in long-term decline, according to ministry figures.
“How can a country diminish its production and increase its exports at the same time? There is something completely inconsistent in the figures and this inconsistency creates suspicions that sanctions are being circumvented,” Bellamy said.
A spokesperson for the Commission said it is working to crack down on loopholes in sanctions regimes and has appointed the EU’s former ambassador to the U.S., David O’Sullivan, as a special envoy tasked with tackling circumvention. The official also pointed out that data cited by Bellamy on Azerbaijani oil transactions, the most recent publicly available, “happened before the sanctions entered into force so there is no question of evasion of sanctions there.”
“Azerbaijan does not export Russian oil to the EU via the BTC pipeline,” said Aykhan Hajizada, spokesperson for the country’s foreign ministry, adding that while “Azerbaijan continues to use all non-sanctioned oil regardless of source,” it “remains committed to conducting its supply and trading operations with the utmost care and diligence, in line with relevant laws and regulations.”
BP has previously been forced to deny that the BTC pipeline carries Russian oil, and data seen by POLITICO for crude shipments from Ceyhan shows a recent dip in the volume of exports to the EU, from around 3 million tons per month (about 700,000 barrels per day) in early 2022 to around 2 million tons a month this year.
Slick operations
At the same time, though, Turkey doubled its direct imports of Russian oil last year and has refused to impose sanctions on Russian crude despite simultaneously offering military and humanitarian support to Ukraine.
Finland’s Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) warned late last year that “a new route for Russian oil to the EU is emerging through Turkey, a growing destination for Russian crude oil,” where it is refined into oil products that are not subject to sanctions and sold on.
“We have enough evidence that some international companies are buying refinery products made from Russian oil and selling them on to Europe,” said Ustenko, the Zelenskyy adviser. “It’s completely legal, but completely immoral. Just because it’s allowed doesn’t mean we don’t need to do anything about it.”
On Monday, British NGO Global Witness released a report that found Russian oil has consistently been sold at prices far exceeding the $60 cap imposed by G7 countries in December last year.
“The fact Russian oil continues to flow round the world is a feature, not a bug, of Western sanctions,” said Mai Rosner, a campaigner who worked on the report. “Governments offered the fossil fuel industry a wide-open back door, and commodity traders and big oil companies are exploiting these loopholes to continue business as usual.”
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
It’s not hard to imagine this scenario: An entrepreneur experiences a problem and decides to build a solution to solve it. It works well, they love the solution and choose to start a business around it. The entrepreneur puts in a lot of energy, time and money to bring the new business into the world. Then they launch the business. And nothing happens. They simply can’t sell their solution.
Whether you’ve launched a new small business or a high-growth startup, you’ve got an uphill battle before you. About 20% of startups won’t survive past their first year in business. There are many reasons why a new business won’t make it, but the one thing I see consistently as a fractional CMO is that the entrepreneur in charge hasn’t done their research.
Doing market research in the early stages of building a company — and regularly after launching — is essential to validate a business idea and build something your market wants to buy.
Yet, this essential step is often overlooked or simply ignored by many business owners. Why?
First, it can be a lot of work. Furthermore, according to Vernon Research Group, you can expect to spend anywhere from $4,000 up to $50,000, depending on your research.
Put those two factors together, and it becomes clearer why entrepreneurs are skipping this step. The truth, however, is that market research can be easy and cost-effective for small business owners. Here are four strategies for running effective market research on a budget.
My favorite way to gather information for market research is to write down the questions I want answers to and have the answers documented through video interviews or surveys.
The more people you can get to give you their insights, the better. To get the most responses for your survey or interviewees to meet with you, you’ve got to start asking. This can be done by posting on your own social media channels, identifying your target customer on LinkedIn and sending them a message asking for help, or even running ads on social media.
The key here is to get scrappy, don’t be afraid to put yourself out there and keep going until you have enough information documented to make an educated decision about how to move forward.
Although it is often undervalued, there is a lot to be said for conducting a thorough competitive analysis to inform the next steps to take in your business.
Researching your competition means stepping beyond comparing your business to one or two others. Find eight to 12 companies that could be considered your competition and analyze everything they do, not just their product features. Who are they identifying as the target market? What are they highlighting in their messaging? What are their price points? How are they showing up on social media?
A strong competitive analysis will help you to identify more clearly how your market is currently being served and how you can fill the gaps.
We are now connected online more than ever before in human history, and people gather in digital spaces over the things that connect them, from their love of pets to their personal challenges. Find the communities where your target market spends their time, follow their conversations and start engaging.
Facebook groups, Twitter and LinkedIn are ideal platforms for identifying and joining communities where your ideal customer might connect with others around a problem you are solving.
4. Start asking questions publicly
Arguably, Quora and Reddit could also be called communities where your target market lives. However, the way people engage and interact on these platforms is fundamentally different. On Facebook groups, Twitter and LinkedIn, you need to spend time engaging and building rapport with others in the community.
On Quora and Reddit, it’s a bit easier to join an existing conversation or post a question and get a direct response from the community at any time, as long as you have a thoughtful, non-promotional question to ask.
These two platforms will likely be the quickest way to start your market research.
The big problem with skipping market research is that you risk building a product or service that no one wants. It’s essential to spend the time — before you start building — to identify your target market, find them, and get feedback on what you’re trying to create.
You simply can’t afford to overlook it or assume you know what the market wants or needs.
Market research is a key component to successfully launching any new business. With a little time and effort, you can successfully confirm that your product has a spot in the market and move forward confidently.
President Joe Biden spent hours during his first foreign trip behind closed doors, attempting to reassure a shaken group of US allies that America was back. It was clear, he later told advisers, just how much work remained to convince them of the durability of that commitment.
Eighteen months after those meetings in Europe, Biden departed Washington on Tuesday for his year-end vacation, riding the momentum of historic legislative success and the defiance of political gravity that has reshaped the expectations for the critical months – and decisions – ahead. It’s a moment that Biden never seemed to doubt would come, even as his party – and some inside the White House – questioned or outright urged a change in approach to address political and economic headwinds driven primarily by soaring inflation that threatened to drag down his presidency.
During those 2021 meetings in England and Belgium, Biden found a group of allies genuinely shaken by the January 6 insurrection and the events that led to it. But the president tried to reassure them that the visceral divides that culminated in the violence that day would heal and the bleak moment in US politics would pass.
He was met with polite appreciation from his foreign counterparts. But the deep skepticism served only to underscore his commitment to a belief that sat at the heart of a pledge that was often pilloried during the campaign as naïve. The only real reassurance, Biden would note, was delivering on what he’d promised.
“That’s why it’s so important that I succeed in my agenda, whether it’s dealing with the vaccine, the economy, infrastructure,” Biden told reporters in Brussels shortly before he boarded Air Force One for a flight to Switzerland and a sit down with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “It’s important that we demonstrate we can make progress and continue to make progress. And I think we’re going to be able to do that.”
The moment provided a brief window into the president’s high-stakes theory of the case – one that appeared exceedingly aspirational given his party’s narrow congressional majorities and staunch GOP opposition. But even as this year began, Biden and his team were grasping to break free of a series of crises and the cornerstone of his agenda – a sweeping bill that included numerous administration priorities – appeared in shambles.
Biden’s anticipated final major action before the end of 2022 serves as an almost poetic coda for his first two years. The $1.7 trillion bipartisan spending package he will sign will lock in key funding priorities and include an overhaul of the law his predecessor cited in the lead up to the January 6 riot.
The turn from aspirational goals to palpable accomplishments – highlighted over the last several months by Biden’s travel to major corporate groundbreakings in states like Ohio, Arizona and Michigan – underpins the sharp reversal for the White House. That turnaround serves as evidence of Biden’s steely belief in his strategies and policy proposals –an approach deeply rooted over his decades in public service.
“One thing that is foundational with him is if he says he’s going to do something, he does it,” Steve Ricchetti, one of Biden’s closest and longest-serving advisers, told CNN in an interview, underscoring an approach that has been defined by steady, and at times stubborn, persistence.
Simple as it may seem, a campaign promise or commitment has tipped internal debates on policy decisions more than once, one White House official noted.
Biden’s closest confidants also stress that it’s a perspective that is instructive as the White House prepares for the dramatically reshaped Washington that will confront him upon his return from his family vacation to the US Virgin Islands.
“The whole idea of showing people government can work – we were mocked for that in some corners,” a Biden adviser said. “That’s literally what’s happening now.”
There are still clear challenges ahead. Inflation remains high even if its grip appears to be easing. Biden’s advisers expect economic growth to slow in the quarters ahead, though they remain cautiously optimistic a recession can be avoided.
Biden’s approval ratings, while ticking up, remain low and his age remains a real, if less publicly addressed, concern held by Democrats as they wait for an official decision about whether he will seek reelection.
But Biden’s overarching approach has guided the early-stage planning for the legislative and political implications of a new House Republican majority and served as the basis for aides already working through the outlines of the State of the Union address that will come early next year.
It’s also a defining element of the structure and message planning of a nascent campaign that has taken shape over the last several months and accelerated. Biden’s senior team has become increasingly confident that a reelection campaign will be green lit in the weeks ahead.
White House officials view the political salience of his agenda as both an underappreciated element of their ability to defy the expectations of sweeping GOP gains in the midterms and as a critical piece of what comes next. The prospect of divided government – and the exceedingly narrow legislative pathway it brings – has limited effect on an agenda that is now in the implementation phase.
“It forms the foundation for even stronger achievements as the nation heads into the New Year,” Mike Donilon, the White House senior adviser and long-standing member of Biden’s inner circle, wrote in a political memo circulated to allies this month.
Biden, advisers said, has laid down strict directives to senior aides and Cabinet officials about the necessity of efficient implementation in the months ahead.
“It’s not subtle,” a senior administration official said of the message from the top. “We have to get it right and in the moments we don’t, we damn well be ready to explain it – and fix it.”
For Biden’s tight-knit and long-serving advisers, this is a moment that both vindicates and validates core elements of a campaign and presidency that at various points were dismissed, underestimated or at some points even mocked.
“A lot of people told him that this wouldn’t resonate, or that it wasn’t the message, or that it’s outdated,” Stef Feldman, the longtime Biden aide who served as the 2020 campaign policy director before following him to the White House, told CNN.
Biden viewed his infrastructure proposal, in particular, as a central policy plank of his campaign as Democratic primary opponents raced to outdo one another with transformational progressive proposals – none of which included a viable way to pass a bitterly divided Congress.
Biden and his economic advisers zeroed in on an intensive manufacturing and supply chain agenda that grew more aggressive and transformational as a once-in-a-century pandemic gripped the country. They saw it as the key to reverse the accelerants at the heart of the atmosphere that created the opening for Donald Trump to reach the Oval Office.
“This was the right moment for his theory of the case,” Feldman said. “He could apply the principles that have really guided him throughout his whole career.”
Those principles have largely stayed with Biden through his time as a senator and vice president and were refined during the critical two years spent out of office as he weighed yet another run for the presidency.
“Ever since I’ve talked to the president about the economy, he’s distinguished between the short-term and the long-term, between consumption and investment,” said Jared Bernstein, Biden’s chief economist as vice president who now sits on the Council of Economic Advisers. “These have always been foundational to his economic thinking.”
The animating principles of Biden’s 2020 campaign hardly diverged from the key themes outlined by Donilon, Biden’s in-house mind-meld, in the 22-page memo he drafted in early 2015 as the then-vice president weighed jumping into the 2016 race.
From think tanks to business schools to Davos, Biden took the role of a kind of middle class evangelist, pressing for the pursuit of policies that addressed short-term incentives that had driven jobs away and wages down. Those speeches and discussions served as a roadmap of sorts for an agenda that is now largely law. They detailed major infrastructure investments and a incentivizing research and development that had atrophied. There were broad outlines of nascent ideas to connect hollowed out manufacturing centers and communities to new opportunities. Biden proposed changes to the tax code that tracked near where his administration would eventually land as it sought to finance spending plans.
Even the anecdotes from the period – whether the one about Chinese leader Xi Jinping and American “possibilities” or his father’s sayings about the dignity of work, or the importance of “breathing room” – are the same that populate his speeches as president.
Ricchetti, who as counselor to the president helped lead the White House legislative effort, pointed to a clear “through-line” from Biden’s days as a senator, through his time as vice president and during the first two years of Trump’s presidency.
Biden wrote a book detailing his decision not to run for president as he dealt with the pain of his son Beau’s fight with, and eventual death from, brain cancer. That process and the book tour that followed are viewed by Biden’s inner circle as an essential experience in the eventual decision to run in 2020.
“Much of what we prioritized at that time we took with us and used as the foundation,” Ricchetti said of the years leading up to the campaign.
If the effort to turn that foundation into a coherent policy agenda was accelerated and expanded in the final months of the campaign, it was turbocharged during a transition that saw Democrats take control of the Senate majority.
Officials structured the infrastructure, manufacturing, research and development, climate and equity proposals into interlocking pieces, designed to work in tandem even if they were eventually scaled back during the legislative process.
“At the core of this strategy was that the power of it is that these things work together,” National Economic Council Chairman Brian Deese, one of the architects of the package, said in an interview.
What the proposals – particularly across industries and policy priorities tied to climate and manufacturing – also represented was a dramatic shift in what had become an entrenched, if not monolithic, economic orthodoxy. Biden would oversee the most consequential pursuit of an industrial policy strategy in decades. He’d do so in many cases with Republican support.
To be clear, subscribing to the term “industrial policy” still isn’t universally embraced. Even Deese, who has driven and defined its core elements, prefers “Modern American Industrial Strategy.” In its simplest form, it’s the idea that “if you do public investment in a thoughtful way, what you’ll actually do is crowd in private investment,” Deese said.
Deese likes to point out its roots in the American economy can be traced to Alexander Hamilton.
But the convergence of factors that led it to once again gain broader, and bipartisan, traction was in many ways tailor-made for Biden.
A resurgence in research and development funding. Significant public investments designed for critical areas of national and economic security. The elevation of labor unions and a focus on creating the conditions to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US.
On their face, these issues are politically popular and hardly exclusive to Biden. They’re also exceedingly difficult to turn into policy. At least until the pandemic.
“There’s a cost associated with industrial weakness,” Deese said. “The pandemic laid bare something that had been the case for years.”
That was true for semiconductors – the tiny chips essential for everything from cars and washing machines to advanced weapons systems – that drove the bipartisan urgency behind the $280 billion CHIPS and Science law. Sen. Todd Young, an Indiana Republican up for reelection in 2022, drove the effort on Capitol Hill – something that underscored the salience of an issue that scrambled traditional political dynamics.
For Young, who had pressed for legislation tied to the issue in the year before Biden entered the White House, it was less about embracing a broader shift in economic policy and more about addressing the fact China had pursued exactly that for a decade or longer.Young was one of 17 Senate Republicans who voted to advance the eventual law that has driven new private sector investment or commitments in the last several months.
The pandemic. The rise of China as key feature of policy making in both parties. A president animated by the idea of long-term economic incentives crafted to connect workers and communities left behind for decades.
“These policy insights might not have come to fruition were it not for a confluence of events,” Bernstein acknowledged.
Ted Kaufman has a simple explanation for Biden’s approach and the places where it paid off after two years.
“There’s a confidence that comes from knowing what you’re doing,” said Kaufman, the former Delaware senator, longtime Biden Senate chief of staff and one of the president’s closest friends. “This is a guy who is so incredibly well qualified to be president because of experience.”
As to why that experience has rarely been rewarded by voters, Kaufman had another simple explanation.
“It’s hard because you have a record,” he said.
In a way it’s both an implicit acknowledgment of the unprecedented factors – most notably Trump, but in some ways the pandemic as well – that created an opening to the presidency for Biden. Another incumbent, or another moment, and advisers note that it wouldn’t be a question of if Biden would win. He wouldn’t have even run.
Instead, as he weighs running for reelection at age 80, he enters the final two years of this term with much of his agenda now law. Core elements of that agenda were driven by bipartisan consensus. Even Biden’s final bipartisan achievement of the year – the $1.7 trillion spending package – includes an initial $500 million to seed the technology and innovation hubs created by the CHIPS and Science Act in parts of the country outside of traditional tech sectors.
While Democrats narrowly lost their House majority in the midterm elections, the party expanded its Senate majority by a seat.
Perhaps most critically for Biden, the voters sharply reject some of the most extreme voices parroting 2020 election lies in critical races for governor and secretary of state.
In the months leading up to the midterm elections, Biden had started regularly recounting the experience with his foreign counterparts on that first foreign trip in an effort to underscore the stakes.
In the weeks that followed, after his travel to Indonesia for the G-20 Summit, he was ready to provide an updated version as he stood against the backdrop of a new factory in Arizona to celebrate the announcement by a Taiwanese chip maker of what would mark one of the largest foreign investments in US history.
“What was clear in those meetings is the United States is better positioned than any other nation to lead the world economy in the years ahead if we keep our focus,” Biden said.
PARIS — When French President Emmanuel Macron’s party lost its absolute majority in parliament six months ago, many wondered what the setback would mean for an ambitious, here-to-disrupt-the-status-quo leader whose first term was defined by a top-down style of management.
It turns out Macron 2.0 is a man about globe, pitching “strategic intimacy” to world leaders, as he leaves domestic politics to his chief lieutenant and concentrates on his preferred sphere: international diplomacy.
The Frenchman’s past “intimate” moves have been well-documented: affectionate hugging with Angela Merkel, knuckle-crunching handshakes with Donald Trump, and serial bromancing with the likes ofJustin Trudeau and Rishi Sunak. Now in his second term, the French president appears to be making a move on — quite literally — the world.
Since his reelection, Macron has been hopping from one official visit to another: in Algeria one day to restore relations with a former colony, in Bangkok another to woo Asian nations, and in Washington most recently to shore up the relationship with Washington. The globetrotting head of state has drawn criticism in the French press that he is deserting the home front.
“He is everywhere, follows everything, but he’s mostly elsewhere,” quipped a French minister speaking anonymously.
“[But] he’s been on the job for five years now, does he really need to follow the minutiae of every project? And the international pressure is very strong. Nothing is going well in the world,” the minister added.
Before COVID-19 struck, Macron’s first term was marked by a brisk schedule of reforms, including a liberalization of the job market aimed at making France more competitive. The French president was hoping to continue in the same pragmatic vein during his second term, focusing on industrial policy and reforming France’s pensions system. While he hasn’t abandoned these goals, the failure to win a parliamentary majority in June has forced him to slow down on the domestic agenda.
Foreign policy in France has always been the guarded remit of the president, but Macron is trying to flip political necessity into opportunity, delegating the tedium and messiness of French parliamentary politics to his Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne.
There are few areas of global diplomacy where the president hasn’t pitched a French initiative in recent months — whether it’s food security in Africa, multilateralism in Asia or boosting civilian resilience in Ukraine. Despite some foreign policy missteps in his first term including the backing of strongman Khalifa Haftar in the Libyan civil war, Macron is now a veteran statesman, eagerly taking advantage of Europe’s leaderless landscape to hog the international stage.
The French president’s full pivot to global diplomacy in his weakened second term at home is reminiscent of past leaders confronting turmoil on the domestic front.
“The Jupiterian period is over. He’s got no majority,” said Cyrille Bret, researcher for the Jacques Delors Institute. “So now he is suffering from the Clinton-second-mandate-syndrome, who after the impeachment attempts over the Lewinsky [inquiry], turned to the international scene, trying to resolve issues in the Balkans, the Middle East and in China.”
But even as Macron embraces the wide world, the pitfalls ahead are numerous. Photo ops with world leaders haven’t done much to slow the erosion of his approval ratings at home. With a recession looming in Europe and discontent over inflation and energy woes, Macron’s margins of maneuver are limited, and trouble at home might ultimately need his attention.
Man about globe
The French president first used the words “strategic intimacy” in October, when he told European leaders gathered in Prague they needed to work on “a strategic conversation” to overcome divisions and start new projects.
If the thought of 44 European leaders cozying up wasn’t bewildering enough, Macron double-downed this month and called for “more strategic intimacy” with the U.S.
It’s not entirely clear what kind of transatlantic liaison he was gunning for, but it certainly included a good dose of tough love. Arriving in Washington, Macron called an American multi-billion package of green subsidies “super aggressive.” (He nonetheless received red carpet treatment at the White House, with Joe Biden calling him “his friend” and even “his closer” — the man who helps him bring deals over the finish line — even if he didn’t actually obtain any concessions from the U.S. president.)
Some of Macron’s success in taking center stage is, of course, due to France’s historical assets: a permanent seat on theU.N. Security Council, a nuclear capacity, a history of military interventions and global diplomacy.
But for the Americans, Macron is also the last dancing partner left in a fast-emptying ballroom across the pond. The U.K. is still embroiled in its own internal affairs and has lost some influence after Brexit, while German Chancellor Olaf Scholz hasn’t filled the space left by Merkel’s departure.
While Macron’s abstract and at times convoluted speeches may not be to everyone’s liking, at least he has got something to say.
“[The Americans] are looking for someone to engage with and there’s a lack of alternatives,” said Sophia Besch, European affairs expert at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “Macron is the last one standing. There’s his enthusiasm, and at the same time he is disruptive for a leader and not always an easy partner.”
“He can count on some reluctant admirers in Washington for his energy,” she said.
The French touch
In his diplomatic endeavors, Macron likes a good surprise.
“Emmanuel Macron doesn’t like working bottom-up, where the political link is lost,” said one French diplomat. “He enjoys surprising people and marking political coups.”
“The [French bureaucracy] doesn’t really like that,” the diplomat added. “We prefer things that are all neat and tidy.”
Conjuring up new ideas — such as the European Political Community — that haven’t quite filtered through the layers of bureaucracy is one of Macron’s ways of pushing the envelope. The newly christened group’s first summit was ultimately hailed as a success, having marked the return of the U.K. to a European forum and displaying the Continent’s unity in the face of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
It’s a technique that forces the hand of other participants but sometimes undermines the credibility of his initiatives, and raises questions about what has really been confirmed. Launching the European Political Community may have been a success; announcing a summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the U.S. president a couple of days before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine less so. (The summit, obviously, never took place.)
Macron’s diplomatic frenzy has also raised speculation that he is already gunning for a top international job for when he leaves the Elysée palace. Macron cannot run for a third term, and speculation is already running high in France on what the hyperactive president will do next.
The question at the heart of Macron’s second term is whether his attempts to be everything and everywhere — combined with his stubborn dedication to controversial ideas — is what will ultimately trip him up.
Even as Macron’s U.S. visit was hailed a success, with him saying France and the US were “fully aligned” on Russia, he sparked controversy on his return when he told a French TV channel that Russia should be offered “security guarantees” in the event of negotiations on ending the war in Ukraine.
“That comment fell out of the line in relation to the coordinated message from Macron and Biden, which was that nothing should be done about Ukraine without Ukraine’s [approval],” said Besch.
Macron says he wants France to be an “exemplary” NATO member, but he still wants France to act as a “balancing power” that does not completely close the door on Russia. It’s a stance that may help France build partnerships with more neutral states across the world, but it does nothing to mend the rift with eastern EU member states.
For the man about globe who presents himself as the champion of European interests, that’s an uncomfortable place to be in.
When it comes to “strategic intimacy,” it’s possible to have too many partners.
Elisa Bertholomey and Eddy Wax contributed to reporting.
Europe, the world’s biggest consumer of chocolate, and West Africa, the leading grower of the cocoa beans used to make it, share a common goal to make the sector sustainable.
But they have opposing views on how to put an end to the social, economic and environmental harms caused by satisfying Europe’s sweet tooth, heralding a showdown over who will bear the costs of complying: Big Chocolate or cocoa farmers.
The EU is finalizing regulations that seek to ensure that chocolate entering the market is free from deforestation and child labor. At the same time, Ghana and Ivory Coast, the world’s biggest cocoa producers, are demanding higher prices. That’s vital, they say, to make sustainable chocolate a possibility — and not a pipe dream.
The stakes are high: For the EU, cocoa is a test case for how companies and producers react when the bloc tries to impose higher standards. For producers, the push to set up a cartel could drive up prices in the short term — but also risks stimulating oversupply and ultimately causing a price crash that would deepen the poverty already suffered by most cocoa farmers. Chocolate makers, facing rising costs and greater scrutiny, may reroute supply chains to other cocoa-producing countries seen as less risky.
Doing nothing is not an option, said Alex Assanvo, who heads the joint West African initiative to support cocoa prices.
“We are not asking to pay them more, we are asking to pay them a fair price,” Assanvo told POLITICO in an interview. “If we believe that this is going to create oversupply, well then I don’t know, maybe we should stop eating chocolate.”
Bittersweet taste
Chocolate may be sweet but the industry that makes it is not. Most of the beans used to produce the world’s supply are grown by impoverished West African farmers; all too often from trees planted on deforested land and harvested by children. One problem drives the others. Poverty pushes farmers to chop down forests to produce more beans and profits and to put children to work as they cannot afford to pay wages to adult laborers.
To address this, Ghana and Ivory Coast, which produce 60 percent of the world’s cocoa, formed an export cartel in 2019 modeled on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). They introduced a $400 per ton Living Income Differential, which aims to bring the floor price up enough to cover the cost of production.
In public, big chocolate manufacturers and traders, including Barry Callebaut, Cargill, Ferrero, Hersey, Lindt, Mars, Mondelez and Nestlé, welcomed the initiative.
Yet behind the scenes many of the firms — which between them account for about 90 percent of the industry’s $130 billion in annual profits — have done everything possible to avoid paying the premium and to drive prices back down, according to the Ivorian Coffee-Cocoa Council (CCC), the Ghana Cocoa Board (Cocobod) and their joint Initiative Cacao Ivory Coast-Ghana (ICCIG).
The companies that responded to requests for comment from POLITICO said that they have paid the Living Income Differential (LID) since its introduction. The Ghanian and Ivorian trade boards and the ICCIG claim, however, that they have negated the LID’s value by forcing down a different premium, the origin differential.
Fed up, these countries boycotted the World Cocoa Foundation Partnership Meeting at the end of October in Brussels. They then gave the companies a deadline: commit to the premiums by November 20 or the countries would ban their buyers from visiting fields to carry out harvest forecasts and suspend their Corporate Social Responsibility programs – which sell well with ethically-minded consumers.
More harm than good?
Another proposed remedy comes from Brussels. Cocoa is one of the products to which the new EU legislation on due diligence — Brussels speak for supply-chain oversight and compliance — would apply.
Under this, large firms operating in the bloc will be forced to evaluate their global supply chains for human rights and environmental abuses, and compensate injured parties. In theory, this should reduce deforestation and child labor and improve the lot of farmers.
Yet, as European ambassadors thrash out the terms — and big players like France push for them to be watered down — concerns are growing that the legislation could turn out at best to be ineffective in practice, and at worst do more harm than good.
Cocoa farmers, and the NGOs that support them, have reason to be skeptical: Back in 2000, a BBC documentary exposed the widespread use of child labor on cocoa plantations in Ivory Coast and Ghana. The resulting media pressure led to a proposal for legislation in the United States forcing companies to certify chocolate bars free of child labor.
Companies pushed back hard, Antonie Fountain, managing director of cocoa NGO coalition The Voice Network, told POLITICO. The proposal was dropped and companies committed instead to a voluntary plan to solve child labor, he explained: “And that turned into a two-decade failure of policy.”
The resulting patchwork of pilot projects failed to transform the sector. Despite an initial decline, nearly 20 years after the framework was introduced 790,000 children in Ivory Coast and 770,000 in Ghana are still working in cocoa, with 95 percent of them exposed to the worst forms of child labor, according to a 2020 report.
Deforestation has meanwhile accelerated.
Ivory Coast has lost up to 90 percent of its forest in the last half century. Between 2000 and 2019 alone 2.4 million hectares of forest was cleared for cocoa farms, representing 45 percent of the total deforestation and forest degradation in the country, according to Trase, a data-driven transparency initiative.
The government’s attempts to safeguard what remains are half-hearted and often undermined by corruption: In 2019 a quarter of Ivory Coast’s cocoa production was in protected areas and forest reserves, the Trase study found. This left the EU exposed to 838,000 hectares of deforestation from Ivorian cocoa. Commodity trader Cargill leads the pack, according to Trase, with its 2019 exports exposed to 183,000 hectares of deforestation.
Over the last decade companies have proposed corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives that aim to tackle both ills. For instance, Mondelez, the maker of Cadbury and Toblerone, recently committed $600 million to tackle deforestation and forced labor in cocoa-producing countries, bringing its total funding for environmental and social issues to $1 billion since 2010.
These sums are, however, puny by comparison with the profits earned by those firms, said Fountain. Mondelez returned $2.5 billion to investors in the first half of 2022.
Mondelez is “excited” about its investments, the firm said in a statement. But it is calling for more sector-wide actions and rethinking its incentive model. Cargill did not respond to a request for comment.
Social responsibility
The big numbers that companies cite about their CSR programs’ reach often boil down to one-off training sessions on productivity for farmers, Uwe Gneiting, senior researcher at Oxfam, told POLITICO. This was the case for 98 percent of the 400 farmers interviewed for research recently carried out by Gneiting and others from the charity into the impact of sustainability programs over the last decade in Ghana on farmers’ incomes.
The research finds that CSR initiatives, which companies use to tout their sustainability credentials to European consumers, have not meaningfully increased farmers’ productivity or profits, pointed out Gneiting. In fact, farmers end up shouldering the associated costs, because companies offer the training but do not pay for extra labor or the fertilizer that farmers need to put it into action.
Instead, Ghanian and Ivorian farmers have been hammered by the soaring cost of production and of living over the last three years, finds the new Oxfam research. Fertilizer costs have increased by more than 200 percent, said Gneiting, along with labor and transportation costs. That in turn has contributed to a decline in yields that have also been hurt by climate change, with weather patterns becoming increasingly unpredictable.
All of this has meant incomes have declined close to 20 percent since 2019, said Gneiting, which for farmers already living on the poverty line is “existential.” The decline would have been much worse, he added, if it hadn’t been for the Living Income Differential. Nonetheless, 90 percent of the farmers interviewed say they are worse off than three years ago.
Over the same period, as cocoa prices have fallen, companies have made “windfall gains,” said Isaac Gyamfi, director of Solidaridad West Africa. “The raw material became cheaper for them. But the price of chocolate didn’t change.”
Can Brussels sort it out?
To what extent the new due diligence directive will make a difference depends on the final text that was put to a meeting of EU trade ministers on Friday.
When the European Commission first came up with the draft it was seen as a game changer, but subsequent wrangling over the regulation’s scope has raised doubts. Last week, ambassadors from France, Spain, Italy and some smaller countries voted down the text in the European Council, seeing the value chain and civil liability provisions as too wide and too ambitious.
Two-thirds of Ivorian cocoa is exported to the EU and the U.K. | Issouf Sanogo/AFP via Getty Images
A European diplomat told POLITICO that France supported the proposed directive “very strongly,” and its view that it was important to concentrate on the “upstream” part of the supply chain was shared by a majority of EU member countries.
NGOs take the view that, while it’s positive that the EU is proposing broad legislation, there is a risk that it ends up replicating the mistakes that undermined the voluntary initiatives. One of these is the potential limitation of the companies’ due diligence obligations to “established business relations.”
“What you’re going to get is a whole bunch of companies that are going to try to have as few established business relations as possible, which just makes supplying commodities more precarious, rather than less,” said Fountain.
Analysis from Trase finds that 55 percent of Ivorian cocoa, two-thirds of which is exported to the EU and the U.K., comes from untraceable sources. NGOs working on cocoa and on other sectors due to be impacted by the new directive are calling for it to be applied to business relationships based on their risk rather than their duration.
The civil liability mechanism, which should guarantee compensation for people whose rights have been violated, has also come under scrutiny. The latest compromise proposal debated in the Council, seen by POLITICO, reduces the risk of companies getting sued by stipulating that a company can only be held liable if it “intentionally or negligently” failed to comply with a due diligence obligation aimed to protect a “natural or legal person” — not a forest, for instance — and subsequently caused damage to that person’s “legal interest protected under national law.” But, it states, a company cannot be held liable “if the damage was caused only by its business partners in its chain of activities.”
Earlier this year, the EU, Ivory Coast and Ghana and the cocoa sector all committed to a roadmap to make cocoa more sustainable, which, they agreed, includes improving farmers’ incomes. Yet it remains unclear whether this will be mentioned in the final draft of the due diligence directive.
“Sustainability cannot exist without a living income,” said Heidi Hautala, Green MEP and chair of the European Parliament’s Responsible Business Conduct Working Group. Hautala, who is among those pushing for the reference to a living income to be included in the final text, added that responsible purchasing practices are “a prerequisite for respect of human rights, environment and climate.”
Living income “needs to be a part of it because otherwise you’re in trouble,” agreed Fountain.
“If you don’t look at what does a farmer need in order to comply, if you don’t make sure that a farmer actually has the right set of income, then all you’re doing is pushing the responsibility for being sustainable back to the farmer. And this is what we’ve done for the last two decades.”
A lobby group backed by Elon Musk and associated with a controversial ideology popular among tech billionaires is fighting to prevent killer robots from terminating humanity, and it’s taken hold of Europe’s Artificial Intelligence Act to do so.
The Future of Life Institute (FLI) has over the past year made itself a force of influence on some of the AI Act’s most contentious elements. Despite the group’s links to Silicon Valley, Big Tech giants like Google and Microsoft have found themselves on the losing side of FLI’s arguments.
In the EU bubble, the arrival of a group whose actions are colored by fear of AI-triggered catastrophe rather than run-of-the-mill consumer protection concerns was received like a spaceship alighting in the Schuman roundabout. Some worry that the institute embodies a techbro-ish anxiety about low-probability threats that could divert attention from more immediate problems. But most agree that during its time in Brussels, the FLI has been effective.
“They’re rather pragmatic and they have legal and technical expertise,” said Kai Zenner, a digital policy adviser to center-right MEP Axel Voss, who works on the AI Act. “They’re sometimes a bit too worried about technology, but they raise a lot of good points.”
Launched in 2014 by MIT academic Max Tegmark and backed by tech grandees including Musk, Skype’s Jaan Tallinn, and crypto wunderkind Vitalik Buterin, FLI is a nonprofit devoted to grappling with “existential risks” — events able to wipe out or doom humankind. It counts other hot shots like actors Morgan Freeman and Alan Alda and renowned scientists Martin (Lord) Rees and Nick Bostrom among its external advisers.
Chief among those menaces — and FLI’s priorities — is artificial intelligence running amok.
“We’ve seen plane crashes because an autopilot couldn’t be overruled. We’ve seen a storming of the U.S. Capitol because an algorithm was trained to maximize engagement. These are AI safety failures today — as these systems become more powerful, harms might become worse,” Mark Brakel, FLI director of European policy, said in an interview.
But the lobby group faces two PR problems. First, Musk, its most famous backer, is at the center of a storm since he started mass firings at Twitter as its new owner, catching the eye of regulators, too. Musk’s controversies could cause lawmakers to get skittish about talking to FLI. Second, the group’s connections to a set of beliefs known as effective altruism are raising eyebrows: The ideology faces a reckoning and is most recently being blamed as a driving force behind the scandal around cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which has unleashed financial carnage.
How FLI pierced the bubble
The arrival of a lobby group fighting off extinction, misaligned artificial intelligence and killer robots was bound to be refreshing to otherwise snoozy Brussels policymaking.
FLI’s Brussels office opened in mid-2021, as discussions about the European Commission’s AI Act proposal were kicking off.
“We would prefer AI to be developed in Europe, where there will be regulations in place,” Brakel said. “The hope is that people take inspiration from the EU.”
A former diplomat, the Dutch-born Brakel joined the institute in May 2021. He chose to work in AI policy as a field that was both impactful and underserved. Policy researcher Risto Uuk joined him two months later. A skilled digital operator — he publishes his analyses and newsletter from the domain artificialintelligenceact.eu — Uuk had previously done AI research for the Commission and the World Economic Forum. He joined FLI out of philosophical affinity: like Tegmark, Uuk subscribes to the tenets of effective altruism, a value system prescribing the use of hard evidence to decide how to benefit the largest number of people.
Since starting in Brussels, the institute’s three-person team (with help from Tegmark and others, including law firm Dentons) has deftly spearheaded lobbying efforts on little-known AI issues.
Elon Musk is one of the Future of Life Institute’s most prominent backers | Carina Johansen/NTB/AFP via Getty Images
Exhibit A: general-purpose AI — software like speech-recognition or image-generating tools used in a vast array of contexts and sometimes affected by biases and dangerous inaccuracies (for instance, in medical settings). General-purpose AI was not mentioned in the Commission’s proposal, but wended its way into the EU Council’s final text and is guaranteed to feature in Parliament’s position.
“We came out and said, ‘There’s this new class of AI — general-purpose AI systems — and the AI Act doesn’t consider them whatsoever. You should worry about this,'” Brakel said. “This was not on anyone’s radar. Now it is.”
The group is also playing on European fears of technological domination by the U.S. and China. “General-purpose AI systems are built mainly in the U.S. and China, and that could harm innovation in Europe, if you don’t ensure they abide by some requirements,” Brakel said, adding this argument resonated with center-right lawmakers with whom he recently met.
Another of FLI’s hobbyhorses is outlawing AI able to manipulate people’s behavior. The original proposal bans manipulative AI, but that is limited to “subliminal” techniques — which Brakel thinks would create loopholes.
But the AI Act’s co-rapporteur, Romanian Renew lawmaker Dragoș Tudorache, is now pushing to make the ban more comprehensive. “If that amendment goes through, we would be a lot happier than we are with the current text,” Brakel said.
So smart it made crypto crash
While the group’s input on key provisions in the AI bill was welcomed, many in Brussels’ establishment look askance at its worldview.
Tegmark and other FLI backers adhere to what’s referred to as effective altruism (or EA). A strand of utilitarianism codified by philosopher William MacAskill — whose work Musk called “a close match for my philosophy” — EA dictates that one should better the lives of as many people as possible, using a rationalist fact-based approach. At a basic level, that means donating big chunks of one’s income to competent charities. A more radical, long-termist strand of effective altruism demands that one strive to minimize risks able to kill off a lot of people — and especially future people, who will greatly outnumber existing ones. That means that preventing the potential rise of an AI whose values clash with humankind’s well-being should be at the top of one’s list of concerns.
A critical take on FLI is that it is furthering thisinterpretation of the so-called effective altruism agenda, one supposedly uninterested in the world’s current ills — such as racism, sexism and hunger — and focused on sci-fi threats to yet-to-be-born folks. Timnit Gebru, an AI researcher whose acrimonious exit from Google made headlines in 2020, has lambasted FLI on Twitter, voicing “huge concerns” about it.
“They are backed by billionaires including Elon Musk — that already should make people suspicious,” Gebru said in an interview. “The entire field around AI safety is made up of so many ‘institutes’ and companies billionaires pump money into. But their concept of AI safety has nothing to do with current harms towards marginalized groups — they want to reorient the entire conversation into preventing this AI apocalypse.”
Effective altruism’s reputation has taken a hit in recent weeks after the fall of FTX, a bankrupt exchange that lost at least $1 billion in customers’ cryptocurrency assets. Its disgraced CEO Sam Bankman-Fried used to be one of EA’s darlings, talking in interviews about his plan to make bazillions and give them to charity. As FTX crumbled, commentators argued that Effective Altruism ideology led Bankman-Fried to cut corners and rationalize his recklessness.
Both MacAskill and FLI donor Buterin defended EA on Twitter, saying that Bankman-Fried’s actions contrasted with the philosophy’s tenets. “Automatically downgrading every single thing SBF believed in is an error,” wrote Buterin, who invented the Ethereum blockchain, and bankrolls FLI’s scholarship for AI existential risk research.
Brakel said that the FLI and EA were two distinct things, and FLI’s advocacy was focused on present problems, from biased software to autonomous weapons, e.g. at the United Nations level. “Do we spend a lot of time thinking about what the world would look like in 400 years? No,” he said. (Neither Brakel nor the FLI’s EU representative, Claudia Prettner, call themselves effective altruists.)
Californian ideology
Another critique of FLI’s efforts to stave off evil AI argues that they obscure a techno-utopian drive to develop benevolent human-level AI. At a 2017 conference, FLI advisers — including Musk, Tegmark and Skype’s Tallinn — debated the likelihood and the desirability of smarter-than-human AI. Most panelists deemed “superintelligence” bound to happen; half of them deemed it desirable. The conference’s output was a series of (fairly moderate) guidelines on developing beneficial AI, which Brakel cited as one of FLI’s foundational documents.
That techno-optimism led Emile P. Torres, a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy who used to collaborate with FLI, to ultimately turn against the organization. “None of them seem to consider that maybe we should explore some kind of moratorium,” Torres said. Raising such points with an FLI staffer, Torres said, led to a sort of excommunication. (Torres’s articles have been taken down from FLI’s website.)
Within Brussels, the worry is that going ahead, FLI might change course from its current down-to-earth incarnation and steer the AI debate toward far-flung scenarios. “When discussing AI at the EU level, we wanted to draw a clear distinction between boring and concrete AI systems and sci-fi questions,” said Daniel Leufer, a lobbyist with digital rights NGO Access Now. “When earlier EU discussions on AI regulation happened, there were no organizations in Brussels placing focus on topics like superintelligence — it’s good that the debate didn’t go in that direction.”
Those who regard the FLI as the spawn of Californian futurism point to its board and its wallet. Besides Musk, Tallinn and Tegmark, donors and advisers include researchers from Google and OpenAI, Meta co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s Open Philanthropy, the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (which in turn has received funding from FTX) and actor Morgan Freeman.
In 2020 most of FLI’s global funding ($276,000 out of $482,479) came from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a charity favored by tech bigwigs like Mark Zuckerberg; 2021 accounts haven’t been released yet.
Brakel denied that the FLI is cozy with Silicon Valley, saying that the organization’s work on general-purpose AI made life harder for tech companies. Brakel said he had never spoken to Musk. Tegmark, meanwhile, is in regular touch with the members of the scientific advisory board, which includes Musk.
In Brakel’s opinion, what the FLI is doing is akin to early-day climate activism. “We currently see the warmest October ever. We worry about it today, but we also worry about the impact in 80 years’ time,” he said last month. “[There] are AI safety failures today — and as these systems become more powerful, the harms might become worse.”
