EU Council pushes 'search plans' to legalise mass chat scans before trilogue

The leak lands hours before negotiators from the Council, Parliament and Commission sit down on Tuesday. According to heise online, the documents show governments want national judicial or independent administrative authorities to hand chat and email providers temporary blanket authorisations to scan message content. The tactic is designed to cement the current state of "chat control 1.0", under which companies such as Facebook and Google voluntarily search for abuse material.

That is not a small detail. The Council insists a permanent law must not fall short of those existing scanning practices. Former MEP Patrick Breyer, quoted by heise, warns the search plans would in practice mean continued scanning of millions of innocent users across parts of a service without any suspicion.

The Council's own lawyers disagree

The Council's Legal Service already warned against the course early on, per the same report. In its opinion, scanning an entire service or parts of it is highly likely to violate EU law, because the European Court of Justice could classify it as general and indiscriminate surveillance. Breyer accuses member states of knowingly accepting a foreseeable failure before the Luxembourg judges. If the regulation were overturned after years of political debate, investigators would be left empty-handed. He argues children and victims deserve legally sound measures instead of security theatre.

The leaked papers also describe a fallback. Should negotiations fail, the Irish Council Presidency has a plan B: exclude private chats from the regulation entirely. That would leave the temporary chat control 1.0 system as a permanent loophole for voluntary mass scans, heise reports. Parliament, meanwhile, continues to back targeted investigations and prevention, including stricter privacy settings, judicial review and suspicion against specific individuals or groups, plus a new EU centre to proactively search publicly accessible content for known abuse material. About 75 percent of reported chats are legally irrelevant, per the same report.

Memory prices force Apple's hand

The regulatory fight is not the only place where policy meets hardware costs. Apple's new CEO John Ternus is reportedly planning small-scale layoffs inside large teams and cancelling projects, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday, according to Yahoo Finance. The memory shortage is raising component costs and services revenue fell quarter over quarter in June for the first time since 2022.

On his final earnings call, Tim Cook said the company had "reluctantly raised prices" because of what he called a "100-year flood on the memory pricing". Sky Hynix, Samsung Electronics and Micron have largely sold out premium AI memory capacity through much of 2026, with Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta competing for supply. MaxLinear, meanwhile, says its new Puma 9 DOCSIS chip will support DDR5 to reduce exposure to DDR4 shortages, per Light Reading, with CPE based on it due in 2027.

Elsewhere in the dossier, the same tension shows in tooling. Unblocked describes an adaptive router that moves LLM traffic between Baseten, Fireworks and CoreWeave based on measured cost and speed; ESPARGOS documents an undocumented raw IQ capture path inside Espressif's ESP32 chips; and Windley details an OpenClaw demo that uses Cedar and a Yubikey to bind human approval to specific agent actions. None of these are export-control stories. All of them are about who controls the hardware and the software that runs on it.