In November 2025, the European Commission unveiled its Digital Omnibus – a package to make digital rules ‘simpler’ for EU businesses.
The AI Act, which is still in the process of being implemented, also made the list. But even before the law has even fully kicked in, the commission is already trimming it back.
That should not come as a surprise to anyone who occasionally reads the news about EU tech regulation. But now, thanks to a new paper from researchers at Trinity College Dublin, Carnegie Mellon, TU Delft and the University of Edinburgh, we have something of a framework to at least assess what is happening.
The researchers put together a taxonomy of 27 distinct mechanisms by which Big AI – the handful of companies that build and deploy frontier AI models, plus the Big Tech firms reorganising around them – captures regulators. Or tries to, at least.
The group of researchers, led by Abeba Birhane, annotated 100 Reuters articles spanning three big global AI summits (UK 2023, Korea 2024, Paris 2025) and the EU AI Act trilogue negotiations.
