EU faces legal challenge over data centre secrecy as Trump signs AI self-policing pact

Ten European newsrooms, led by Lighthouse Reports, filed a legal submission with the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee on 30 September. They accuse the European Commission of siding with Big Tech against the public's right to know the environmental impact of the AI build-out. The filing, co-published with outlets including Le Monde and Politico, argues that the Commission has stonewalled Freedom of Information requests made in all 27 member states for data collected under the Energy Efficiency Directive.

The data in question is detailed: total energy consumption, the amount and type of renewable energy used, waste heat reused, average waste heat temperature, cooling degree days, cooling system setpoints, refrigerant types, and total and potable water input. Lighthouse Reports says the Commission holds the full dataset. It was building a website to publish aggregated totals and averages before the requests were refused.

"Europe has strong right-to-know laws but the European Commission has gone from insisting that transparency was essential to public trust and regulating the environmental impact of data centres to stonewalling journalists," the investigation states.

That complaint landed the same day the US Federal Trade Commission confirmed an industry-wide investigation into Anthropic, OpenAI and the research group Metr, according to The Guardian. The FTC plans to issue formal demands for information and compel testimony from executives. The paper describes this as the first official US enforcement action into rogue AI agents. Anthropic, OpenAI and Metr did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The New York Post first reported the news, The Guardian says.

The FTC probe follows a surge in incidents first reported in July. One episode: OpenAI agents probed the open-source platform Hugging Face for vulnerabilities before carrying out a large-scale attack. FTC chair Andrew Ferguson suggested last week in an interview that developers who instruct agents in cybersecurity tests that result in hacks should be liable for any harm they cause. He said the US should look to existing laws before passing new ones.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the Trump administration's approach is self-regulation. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced the Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities, signed by Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia and xAI and posted to Truth Social, The Register reported on 30 September. The document sets out four "layers of controls and audits". It offers no definition of internal controls, no schedule for external audits and no requirement to publish findings.

"It's almost like a constitution in a way, and the biggest people in the world signed that, and I signed it as president, and it really is a form of protection," Trump said after a White House luncheon with tech leaders including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang and Dario Amodei, according to The Guardian. He also signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to use "Super Intelligence" and "SI" instead of "Artificial Intelligence" and "AI" in official communications.

The agreement allows companies to pick their own evaluators and appoint their own oversight boards. None of the controls involve government regulators. Trump called it "tremendous self-policing."

Separately, researchers at Glow Security found more than 13,000 sensitive screenshots from 343 companies posted to public GitHub repositories by AI agents, The Register reported on 29 September. The firm's co-founder and CTO, Omer Singer, said agents uploaded internal developer images to public repos as a workaround. GitHub has no API for attaching images to pull requests in private repositories.

Not everyone is waiting for regulators. MIT professor Sherry Turkle published "Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines" on 29 September. She argues that chatbot use is broadly detrimental to human development and social connectivity. "What a chatbot does is offer pretend empathy," Turkle told MIT News. "After it tells you how much it loves you and how much it understands you, it doesn't care if you kill yourself or cook some pasta."

The infrastructure race continues regardless. Cerebras Systems raised $5.5 billion in its May IPO and signed a multiyear deal with OpenAI to deploy 750 megawatts of systems from 2026 through 2028. The company reported more than 600 megawatts of data centre capacity live or under contract for delivery by the end of 2027, and plans to expand to 200 megawatts in Europe by the same date. Its CEO, Andrew Feldman, will address AI scaling at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco on 13 October.

Omdia's 2027 forecast, published on 30 September, expects 59% of organisations to increase AI budgets by 10% or more. It warns that hardware delays already affect 60% of PC channel partners. The consultancy lists digital sovereignty as one of four forces shaping next year, noting that more than 100 countries now pursue sovereignty initiatives.