🧠 After three years of negotiations, Europe’s AI rulebook is finally here. The question is no longer “will AI be regulated?” but “how, and when?” From risk categories to real-world impact, this is the EU AI Act. We break down what you need to know.

Chris O'Brien + Helen O'Reilly-Durand

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Headlines

🗞️ Alan is back on the fundraising circuit, reportedly shopping a new round at a €5 billion valuation as it looks to keep growing France’s most hyped digital health insurer, according to Bloomberg. The company wants to raise north of €100 million, though the final number is still in flux. Founded a decade ago by Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve, Alan has evolved from a sleek digital insurer into a full-service health platform, bundling insurance with care access and doctor networks. It has also been getting high marks for its aggressive embrace of AI (Read: Alan Goes All-In On AI). As a result, Investors seem happy to go along for the ride: its last round in late 2024 valued the company at €4 billion and drew in heavyweights like Ontario Teachers’, Index Ventures, and Coatue. The raise would put Alan in the same valuation league as French health-tech darlings Doctolib and the newly flush Nabla. | Bloomberg

🗞️ France has decided it’s had enough of X’s anything-goes era and sent prosecutors straight into the company’s Paris offices. The raid is part of a sweeping investigation into allegations ranging from the spread of child sexual abuse images to sexually explicit deepfakes. Elon Musk has been summoned for questioning, alongside former "CEO" Linda Yaccarino, as authorities probe whether X knowingly played a role in distributing illegal content. The timing isn’t great: Musk’s AI chatbot Grok recently triggered global backlash after churning out nonconsensual sexualized deepfake images on demand. Meanwhile, UK regulators are piling on, opening their own investigations into how X and Musk’s AI outfit xAI handled personal data while building Grok. For Musk, it's just another day of drama, whether it's trying to get into "wild parties" on Jeffrey Epstein's sex island or merging SpaceX with xAI so he can buy Twitter for the third time in four years, the man is just...non-stop. | Associated Press

🗞️ One product announcement from Anthropic was all it took to send a chunk of the French stock market into an AI-induced panic. After the US startup unveiled a new tool designed to automate legal work, investors promptly dumped anything that looked remotely “AI-disruptable,” sending Capgemini and Publicis down about 9% and knocking nearly 6% off Teleperformance. The sell-off rippled far beyond France, with legal and data heavyweights like RELX, Wolters Kluwer, Thomson Reuters, and LSE Group taking double-digit hits even though Anthropic’s tool doesn’t directly replace their core businesses. Analysts called it classic contagion trading, where fear moves faster than facts. Underneath the market drama is a familiar anxiety: that AI will squeeze prices, cut out intermediaries, and leave traditional services firms fighting for relevance. | BFM

🗞️ Deezer is getting serious about the AI music epidemic. The French streaming platform has licensed its AI-detection technology to France's royalty agency Sacem in a deal aimed at stopping AI-musicmakers from flooding the system with machine-made tracks designed to steal royalties from actual musicians. The company's been pretty effective at it too, catching and removing up to 85% of fraudulent AI-generated streams in 2025, which is impressive considering AI-generated uploads have ballooned from just 10% of daily uploads last year to a whopping 39% now. The detection tool basically has superhero ears, analyzing audio for telltale patterns that machines like Suno and Udio leave behind, anomalies so subtle humans can't hear them. However, not everyone's convinced that tech alone is the answer. Sweden's Stim royalty society argues that mandatory licensing and transparency about training data would actually nip the problem in the bud rather than just treating the symptoms. | Reuters

🗞️ In what might be a record for French military procurement, the DGA (Direction générale de l'armement) just delivered 1,000 combat drones to the army in under a year, a feat made possible by French startup Harmattan AI, which went from non-existent two years ago to becoming France's first defense-sector unicorn.

The 1.8 kg micro-drones are equipped with infrared cameras from fellow French company Lynred and boast a 40-minute flight time and 2+ kilometer range. According to the military, they are already seeing action in the Orion military exercise kicking off this month. What makes this actually impressive isn't just the speed; it's that the DGA managed to streamline its typically Byzantine procurement process through a simplified request-for-proposal and the broader "aerial defense drones pact." | French Defense Department

🗞️ Speaking of drones...a small French precision-machining firm has quietly built what looks like a very loud answer to the Shahed drone problem. ALM Meca’s Fury 120 is a jet-powered interceptor drone that screams along at 700 km/h—about three times faster than the suicide drones it’s meant to hunt by pulling up to 20G like a tiny fighter jet. Developed in under a year and entirely on the company’s own dime, the project surprised industry observers and seemed to appear out of nowhere as it bypassed France’s defense procurement agency and the usual big-industry suspects. At just over a meter long, the Fury is designed to physically intercept incoming attack drones, and its creators insist there’s nothing else like it in Europe. The timing is impeccable, as NATO countries keep dealing with Russian drone incursions spilling over borders from Ukraine. Whether Fury becomes Europe’s go-to counter-drone or just the best-kept secret in French defense now depends on whether governments decide to buy what a scrappy SME built without asking permission. | Challenges, United24

🗞️ Qwant is officially jumping on the conversational search bandwagon, while insisting it’s doing it the European way. The French search engine (reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated, apparently!) has launched an AI chat feature on both Qwant and Lilo, letting users talk to their search results instead of endlessly clicking blue links. Qwant says the chat doesn’t replace traditional results, but layers context and follow-up questions on top, with sources still visible and tied to the live web. The pitch is fewer dead ends, more continuous dialogue, and no hallucinated answers floating free of reality. It’s free, optional, and very much framed as a response to users’ growing addiction to chat-style interfaces. Under the hood, this is also a sovereignty play, tying into Qwant’s longer-term plan to build a fully European search and AI stack with Ecosia. | PR

🗞️ France has cautiously waved through MARA Holdings’ plan to buy a 64% stake in Exaion, EDF’s low-carbon data center spinout. But only after putting it through the full Bercy regulatory wringer. The deal, now parked under strict conditions from the Treasury, keeps “sensitive” activities and industrial capacity firmly on French soil and bars EDF from dabbling in bitcoin mining or HPC on the side for two years. Born in EDF’s startup incubator to recycle aging supercomputers, Exaion pitched itself as a green compute play for AI, HPC, and blockchain. But it’s been burning cash, posting €4.5 million in losses on just €2 million in revenue last year. That made MARA’s $168 million offer hard to ignore, even as lawmakers raised red flags about technological sovereignty and the optics of a US bitcoin miner muscling into French infrastructure. The controversy escalated all the way to the financial prosecutor after MPs sounded the alarm, turning what could’ve been a quiet M&A into a national debate about energy, crypto, and control. Now MARA gets its European beachhead—assuming it can survive France’s regulatory maze without tripping over politics, paperwork, or both. | Simplywall, Les Echos

🗞️ STATION F locked down a partnership with Mistral AI, Europe's hot-shot AI decacorn known for building open, efficient foundation models, bringing the company's teams directly onto campus for workshops, technical events, and exclusive handholding for the most advanced startups. The announcement comes just a couple of weeks after Station F announced a similar deal with Yankee favorite OpenAI. So, fun!

With 80% of STATION F's residents now building AI products, Station F is basically an AI hothouse with restaurants, which, what's so bad about that? Now Mistral's leadership and engineers will be hanging around campus regularly, which means startups get direct access to one of Europe's most serious AI teams without having to take the Paris Metro all the way up the 18th arrondissement and Mistral's new glass and steel palace. | Station F

🗞️ École Polytechnique and ENSAE Paris are banking on AI to rewire Quantitative Finance. The top universities are launching MaQI, a new Master's program that promises to train the next generation of algorithm architects who'll reshape finance through artificial intelligence, because apparently, traditional quantitative finance hasn't disrupted itself fast enough. The two-year program, taught entirely in English and backed by BNP Paribas, Qube Research & Technologies, and even the financial regulator AMF, is explicitly designed to position France as the global hub for AI-powered finance. The real innovation isn't just the cutting-edge curriculum on generative AI and machine learning for risk management; it's the co-teaching model where every second-year course has both an AI expert and a quant finance guru tag-teaming the lecture hall. | PR

🗞️ France’s market watchdog has discovered what everyone else already knows: AI is everywhere in finance. Also, it's mostly doing the boring stuff. In a new report, the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF) found that about 90% of French financial players are already using AI or planning to, with generative AI now the tool of choice for summarizing documents, drafting text, translating reports, and acting as an internal “copilot.” Actual customer-facing or revenue-driving use cases are still the exception, not the rule. Most firms rely heavily on off-the-shelf tools from a small club of US tech giants, which raises familiar worries about data protection, tech dependence, and whether humans are still paying attention. Regulators themselves are also leaning into AI, using it to detect fraud, market abuse, and scams while repeatedly reminding everyone that accountability still sits with management, not the algorithm. | AMF

Other Headlines

🗞️ The AI brain drain: Why Europe can’t keep the talent it trains | Europe is seeing its AI experts move abroad. Even with strong universities and top research, the EU has a hard time turning these advantages into global leadership in AI. | Euro News

ICYMI

🗞️ Europe's AI Reckoning: Caught Between Regulation, Rivalry, and Risk | As 2026 begins, France and the European Union find themselves at the center of a perfect storm, facing diplomatic confrontation with Washington, urgent safety crises, and mounting questions about whether their regulatory approach can survive first contact with geopolitical reality. | The French Tech Journal

🗞️ From Tesla to Paris: UMA's Audacious Bet on European Robotics | A new French startup believes Europe—not Silicon Valley—is the best place to build the robots of tomorrow. | The French Tech Journal

🗞️ Gradium Wants To Make Voice The New Operating System for AI | The Paris startup, spun out of research lab Kyutai, just emerged from stealth with a $60M seed round to become the global foundation layer for real-time voice interactions. | The French Tech Journal

🗞️ How HyprView Is Using Photonics And AI To Bring Cancer Diagnostics Into the Light | Thanks to developments in AI, photonics is stepping out of the lab and into the clinic. HyprView uses light to uncover the invisible biology inside tumors - information microscopes miss entirely - opening the door to faster, smarter, and far more predictive cancer diagnostics. | The French Tech Journal

🧠 The EU AI Act, Decoded

If it feels like Europe has been talking about regulating artificial intelligence forever, that is because it almost has.

After more than three years of negotiations, rewrites, lobbying, and late-night trilogues, the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act finally entered into force on August 1st, 2024. The legislation is the world’s first comprehensive, legally binding framework for AI.

Since then, implementation has followed a phased approach, with different obligations officially coming into effect over two years (from February 2025 to August 2027). So if you’re a founder, operator, or investor, the real question is not what has been adopted, but what actually applies today?

And what is still very much in motion.

🗣️ Announcements 🗣️

🚀 €1M AI Challenge for Space Data Innovation | Apply by March 9 | The Île-de-France Region and CNES officially launch a €1 million AI Challenge to accelerate innovation at the intersection of artificial intelligence and space data. Continuing the Region’s AI Challenge series started in 2019, this initiative aims to foster future national champions and strengthen France’s technological and economic sovereignty. Two tracks are open: (1) AI-powered applications leveraging satellite data for use cases such as security, energy, environment, and risk management; and (2) advanced vision-language models for automatic interpretation of high- and very-high-resolution satellite imagery. CNES will provide data, technical expertise, and project oversight. | Apply via the Île-de-France Region platform: Challenge AI for Space

🚀 National AI Mapping | Deadline February 15 | Hub France IA is launching a second invitation to startups, SMEs, and innovative companies located outside of Paris to join the 2026 national map of French artificial intelligence. This sixth edition, launched once before, aims to provide an accurate snapshot of the AI ​​ecosystem across the country, highlighting the diversity of regional dynamics. More than 700 AI stakeholders are already listed. Interested regional gems can still apply now until February 15, 2026. | Registration link

📆 Events 📆

📆 2026 AI Predictions & Founder Mixer - powered by 🧠 The AI Collective x Paatch 🚀 | February 5 | To kick off the year, The AI Collective and Paatch are bringing together founders, engineers, and operators for an evening focused on grounded AI predictions and high-signal connections. No hype cycles, no polished decks, just people who spent 2025 shipping, breaking, and rebuilding AI systems, comparing notes on what comes next. | Request to join

📆 AI FILM HACKATHON | Paris | February 7 | Official Paris pre-event of the international AI FILM FEST MONACO, this hackathon brings together creative technologists to learn AI filmmaking, build short films using AI tools, master generative workflows (including voice generation with ElevenLabs), and present their projects for potential selection and competition in Monaco — all with hands-on workshops, team collaboration, and creative skill building for AI-powered storytelling. | Join Waitlist

📆 {Tech: Europe} Paris AI Hackathon – Paris Edition | Feb 7–8 | Paris | A weekend-long AI hackathon designed for builders across functions (founders, engineers, product, researchers) to collaborate, innovate, and prototype cutting-edge AI solutions; features structured networking, team match-making, mentor support, and a prize pool awarded at the conclusion of the competition. | Request to Join

📆 No-Code Communities Meetup #3 — AI Edition | February 9, 2026, 7:00 PM | Paris | A special meetup for no-code and AI builders to connect over drinks and conversation, celebrate the intersection of AI and no-code ecosystems, and build community — ideal for founders, operators, designers, and anyone curious about practical AI and no-code workflows. | Register

📆 AI Day 2026 | France Digitale | February 10 | At Station F in Paris, this flagship AI event gathers ~2,000 founders, C-level leaders, investors, researchers, and operators from across Europe. Explore AI & Research, AI & Business, and AI & Operations tracks through high-level talks, hands-on workshops, demos, exhibitions, and structured matchmaking between startups and investors — all under the high patronage of the French President. | Get tickets

📆 World AI Cannes Festival (WAICF) | February 12 and 13 | Palais des Festivals et des Congrès de Cannes | With more than 10,000 expected participants, 320 international speakers, and 180 exhibitors, the WAICF is the European event dedicated to the innovations and strategic challenges of artificial intelligence. | Buy tickets

📆 Paris Hardware Meetup | The New Defense Stack | February 17 | Join Paris-area hardware builders — founders, engineers, designers, and investors — for talks and community networking focused on defense hardware and physical product innovation at Hexa (eFounders) in Paris. Speakers include leaders from Harmattan AI, Helsing, Landroval, and more, with structured talks followed by open mic and networking. | Request to join

📆 Neurons and Peppers #3 | February 18 | Paris | The state-of-the-art AI research meetup in Paris hosted by Neurons and Peppers by datacraft, focused on deep technical sessions such as domain-specific modeling and retrieval-augmented generation benchmarking, followed by community networking, talks, and food & drinks. | Request to Join

📆 AI in Higher Education Summit 2026 | March 17–18 | ESCP Business School | Paris | Artificial intelligence is transforming universities at every level — from classrooms to research labs and administrative offices. The AI in Higher Education Summit 2026 in Paris will bring together academics, innovators, and policy-makers to discuss one central question: How should higher education evolve in an AI-driven world? This international event is the place to exchange ideas, showcase innovations, and shape the roadmap for universities in the age of AI. | Pre-Registration

📆 OpenText Summit Paris 2026 | April 15 | Palais Brongniart | AI is everywhere and full of promise — but without contextualized data, governance, and security, AI fails. Join OpenText Summit Paris 2026 to discover how to unlock the intelligence of your enterprise data and activate AI with confidence. Expect visionary keynotes, French customer success stories, real-world use cases, in-depth small-group sessions, live demos, expert meetings, and peer networking. Explore the latest innovations in content management, cybersecurity, service management, business networks, and more — and learn how to deploy responsible, compliant AI with full control and freedom of choice. | Register

📆 RAISE Summit 2026 | July 8–9, 2026 | Carrousel du Louvre, Paris | Join one of Europe’s most influential AI gatherings bringing together thousands of builders, investors, executives, and innovators to shape the future of artificial intelligence. Learn from global leaders through keynotes, panels, workshops, a hackathon, startup competitions, and high-impact networking — all curated to accelerate AI strategy, investment, and real-world deployment across industries. | Tickets

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