LONDON — Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney left Beijing and promptly declared the U.S.-led “world order” broken. Don’t expect his British counterpart to do the same. Keir Starmer will land in the Chinese capital Wednesday for the first visit by a U.K. prime minister since 2018. By meeting President Xi Jinping, he will end what he has called an “ice age” under the previous Conservative administration, and try to win deals that he can sell to voters as a boost to Britain’s sputtering economy. Starmer is one of a queue of leaders flocking to the world’s second-largest economy, including France’s Emmanuel Macron in December and Germany’s Friedrich Merz next month. Like Carney did in Davos last week, the British PM has warned the world is the most unstable it has been for a generation. Yet unlike Carney, Starmer is desperate not to paint this as a rupture from the U.S. — and to avoid the criticism Trump unleashed on Carney in recent days over his dealings with China. The U.K. PM is trying to ride three horses at once, staying friendly — or at least engaging — with Washington D.C., Brussels and Beijing.  It is his “three-body problem,” joked a senior Westminster figure who has long worked on British-China relations. POLITICO spoke to 22 current and former officials, MPs, diplomats, industry figures and China experts, most of whom were granted anonymity to speak frankly. They painted a picture of a leader walking the same tightrope he always has surrounded by grim choices — from tricky post-Brexit negotiations with the EU, to Donald Trump taking potshots at British policies and freezing talks on a U.K.-U.S. tech deal. Starmer wants his (long-planned) visit to China to secure growth, but be cautious enough not to compromise national security or enrage Trump. He appears neither to have ramped up engagement with Beijing in response to Trump, nor reduced it amid criticism of China’s espionage and human rights record. In short, he doesn’t want any drama. “Starmer is more managerial. He wants to keep the U.K.’s relationships with big powers steady,” said one person familiar with planning for the trip. “You can’t really imagine him doing a Carney or a Macron and using the trip to set out a big geopolitical vision.” An official in 10 Downing Street added: “He’s clear that it is in the U.K.’s interests to have a relationship with the world’s second biggest economy. While the U.S. is our closest ally, he rejects the suggestion that means you can’t have pragmatic dealings with China.” He will be hoping Trump — whose own China visit is planned for April — sees it that way too. BRING OUT THE CAVALRY Starmer has one word in his mind for this trip — growth, which was just 0.1 percent in the three months to September. The prime minister will be flanked by executives from City giants HSBC, Standard Chartered, Schroders and the London Stock Exchange Group; pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca; car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover; energy provider Octopus; and Brompton, the folding bicycle manufacturer. The priority in Downing Street will be bringing back “a sellable headline,” said the person familiar with trip planning quoted above. The economy is the overwhelming focus. While officials discussed trying to secure a political win, such as China lifting sanctions it imposed on British parliamentarians in 2021, one U.K. official said they now believe this to be unlikely. Between them, five people familiar with the trip’s planning predicted a large number of deals, dialogues and memorandums of understanding — but largely in areas with the fewest national security concerns. These are likely to include joint work on medical, health and life sciences, cooperation on climate science, and work to highlight Mandarin language schemes, the people said.  Officials are also working on the mutual recognition of professional qualifications and visa-free travel for short stays, while firms have been pushing for more expansive banking and insurance licences for British companies operating in China. The U.K. is meanwhile likely to try to persuade Beijing to lower import tariffs on Scotch whisky, which doubled in February 2025. A former U.K. official who was involved in Britain’s last prime ministerial visit to China, by Theresa May in 2018, predicted all deals will already be “either 100 or 99 percent agreed, in the system, and No. 10 will already have a firm number in its head that it can announce.” THREADING THE NEEDLE Yet all five people agreed there is unlikely to be a deal on heavy energy infrastructure, including wind turbine technology, that could leave Britain vulnerable to China. The U.K. has still not decided whether to let Ming Yang, a Chinese firm, invest £1.5 billion in a wind farm off the coast of Scotland. And while Carney agreed to ease tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs), three of the five people familiar with the trip’s planning said that any deep co-operation on EV technology is likely to be off the table. One of them predicted: “This won’t be another Canada moment. I don’t see us opening the floodgates on EVs.” Britain is trying to stick to “amber and green areas” for any deals, said the first person familiar with the planning. The second of the five people said: “I think they‘re going for the soft, slightly lovey stuff.” Britain has good reason to be reluctant, as Chinese-affiliated groups have long been accused of hacking and espionage, including against MPs and Britain’s Electoral Commission. Westminster was gripped by headlines in December about a collapsed case against two men who had been accused of spying for China. Chinese firm Huawei was banned from helping build the U.K.’s 5G phone network in 2020 after pressure from Trump. Even now, Britain’s security agencies are working on mitigations to telecommunications cables near the Tower of London. They pass close to the boundary of China’s proposed embassy, which won planning approval last week. Andrew Small, director of the Asia Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank working on foreign and security policy, said: “The current debate about how to ‘safely’ increase China’s role in U.K. green energy supplies — especially through wind power — has serious echoes of 5G all over again, and is a bigger concern on the U.S. side than the embassy decision.”  Starmer and his team also “don’t want to antagonize the Americans” ahead of Trump’s own visit in April, said the third of the five people familiar with trip planning. “They’re on eggshells … if they announce a new dialogue on United Nations policy or whatever bullshit they can come up with, any of those could be interpreted as a broadside to the Trump administration.” All these factors mean Starmer’s path to a “win” is narrow. Tahlia Peterson, a fellow working on China at Chatham House, the international affairs think tank, said: “Starmer isn’t going to ‘reset’ the relationship in one visit or unlock large-scale Chinese investment into Britain’s core infrastructure.” Small said foreign firms are being squeezed out of the Chinese market and Xi is “weaponizing” the dependency on Chinese supply chains. He added: “Beijing will likely offer extremely minor concessions in areas such as financial services, [amounting to] no more than a rounding error in economic scale.” Chancellor Rachel Reeves knows the pain of this. Britain’s top finance minister was mocked when she returned with just £600 million of agreements from her visit to China a year ago. One former Tory minister said the figure was a “deliberate insult” by China. Even once the big win is in the bag, there is the danger of it falling apart on arrival. Carney announced Canada and China would expand visa-free travel, only for Beijing’s ambassador to Ottawa to say that the move was not yet official. Despite this, businesses have been keen on Starmer’s re-engagement.  Rain Newton-Smith, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, said firms are concerned about the dependence on Chinese rare earths but added: “If you map supply chains from anywhere, the idea that you can decouple from China is impossible. It’s about how that trade can be facilitated in the best way.” EMBASSY ROW Even if Starmer gets his wins, this visit will bring controversies that (critics say) show the asymmetry in Britain’s relationship with China. A tale of two embassies serves as a good metaphor.  Britain finally approved plans last week for China’s new outpost in London, despite a long row over national security. China held off formally confirming Starmer’s visit until the London embassy decision was finalized, the first person familiar with planning for the trip said. (Others point out Starmer would not want to go until the issue was resolved.) The result was a scramble in which executives were only formally invited a week before take-off. And Britain has not yet received approval to renovate its own embassy in Beijing. Officials privately refer to the building as “falling down,” while one person who has visited said construction materials were piled up against walls. It is “crumbling,” added another U.K. official: “The walls have got cracks on them, the wallpaper’s peeling off, it’s got damp patches.” British officials refused to give any impression of a “quid pro quo” for the two projects under the U.K.’s semi-judicial planning system. But that means much of Whitehall still does not know if Britain’s embassy revamp in Beijing will be approved, or held back until China’s project in London undergoes a further review in the courts. U.K. officials are privately pressing their Chinese counterparts to give the green light. One of the people keenest on a breakthrough will be Britain’s new ambassador to Beijing Peter Wilson, a career diplomat described by people who have met him as “outstanding,” “super smart” and “very friendly.”  For Wilson, hosting Starmer will be one of his trickiest jobs yet. The everyday precautions when doing business in China have made preparations for this trip more intense. Government officials and corporate executives are bringing secure devices and will have been briefed on the risk of eavesdropping and honeytraps. One member of Theresa May’s 2018 delegation to China recalled opening the door of what they thought was their vehicle, only to see several people with headsets on, listening carefully and typing. They compared it to a scene in a spy film. Activists and MPs will put Starmer under pressure to raise human rights issues — including what campaigners say is a genocide against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province — on a trip governed by strict protocol where one stray word can derail a deal.  Pro-democracy publisher Jimmy Lai, who has British nationality, is facing sentencing in Hong Kong imminently for national security offenses. During the PM’s last meeting with Xi in 2024, Chinese officials bundled British journalists out of the room when he raised the case. Campaigners had thought Lai’s sentencing could take place this week. All these factors mean tension in the British state — which has faced a tussle between “securocrats” and departments pushing for growth — has been high ahead of the trip. Government comments on China are workshopped carefully before publication. Earlier this month, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper told POLITICO her work on Beijing involves looking at “transnational repression” and “espionage threats.” But when Chancellor Rachel Reeves met China’s Finance Minister He Lifeng in Davos last week to tee up Starmer’s visit, the U.K. Treasury did not publicize the meeting — beyond a little-noticed photo on its Flickr account. SLOW BOAT TO CHINA Whatever the controversies, Labour’s China stance has been steadily taking shape since before Starmer took office in 2024. Labour drew inspiration from its sister party in Australia and the U.S. Democrats, both of which had regular meetings with Beijing. Party aides argued that after a brief “golden era” under Conservative PM David Cameron, Britain engaged less with China than with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The result of Labour’s thinking was the policy of “three Cs” — “challenge, compete, and cooperate.” A procession of visits to Beijing followed, most notably Reeves last year, culminating in Starmer’s trip. His National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell was involved in planning across much of 2025, even travelling to meet China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, in November. Starmer teed up this week’s visit with a December speech arguing the “binary” view of China had persisted for too long. He promised to engage with Beijing carefully while taking a “more transactional approach to pretty well everything.”  The result was that this visit has long been locked in; just as Labour aides argue the London embassy decision was set in train in 2018, when the Tory government gave diplomatic consent for the site. Labour ministers “just want to normalize” the fact of dealing with China, said the senior Westminster figure quoted above. Newton-Smith added: “I think the view is that the government’s engagement with eyes wide open is the right strategy. And under the previous government, we did lose out.” But for each person who praises the re-engagement, there are others who say it has left Britain vulnerable while begging for scraps at China’s table. Hawks argue the hard details behind the “three Cs” were long nebulous, while Labour’s long-awaited “audit” of U.K.-China relations was delayed before being folded briefly into a wider security document. “Every single bad decision now can be traced back to the first six months,” argued the third person familiar with planning quoted above. “They were absolutely ill-prepared and made a series of decisions that have boxed them into a corner.” They added: “The government lacks the killer instinct to deal with China. It’s not in their DNA.” Luke de Pulford, a human rights campaigner and director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, argued the Tories had engaged with China — Foreign Secretary James Cleverly visited in 2023 — and Labour was simply going much further. “China is pursuing an enterprise to reshape the global order in its own image, and to that end, to change our institutions and way of life to the extent that they’re an obstacle to it,” he said. “That’s what they’re up to — and we keep falling for it.” END OF THE OLD ORDER? His language may be less dramatic, but Starmer’s visit to China does have some parallels with Canada. Carney’s trip was the first by a Canadian PM since 2017, and he and Xi agreed a “new strategic partnership.” Later at Davos, the Canadian PM talked of “the end of a pleasant fiction” and warned multilateral institutions such as the United Nations are under threat. One British industry figure who attended Davos said of Carney’s speech: “It was great. Everyone was talking about it. Someone said to me that was the best and most poignant speech they’d ever seen at the World Economic Forum. That may be a little overblown, but I guess most of the speeches at the WEF are quite dull.” The language used by Starmer, a former human rights lawyer devoted to multilateralism, has not been totally dissimilar. Britain could no longer “look only to international institutions to uphold our values and interests,” he said in December. “We must do it ourselves through deals and alliances.” But while some in the U.K. government privately agree with Carney’s point, the real difference is the two men’s approach to Trump. Starmer will temper his messaging carefully to avoid upsetting either his Chinese hosts or the U.S., even as Trump throws semi-regular rocks at Britain. To Peterson, this is unavoidable. “China, the U.S. and the EU are likely to continue to dominate global economic growth for the foreseeable future,” she said. “Starmer’s choice is not whether to engage, but how.” Esther Webber contributed reporting.

BRUSSELS — The European Commission has opened an antitrust investigation into whether Google breached EU competition rules by using the content of web publishers, as well as video uploaded to YouTube, for artificial intelligence purposes. The investigation will examine whether Google is distorting competition by imposing unfair terms and conditions on publishers and content creators, or by granting itself privileged access to such content, thus placing rival AI models at a disadvantage, the Commission said on Tuesday. In a statement, the EU executive said it was concerned that Google may have used the content of web publishers to provide generative AI-powered services on its search results pages without appropriate compensation to publishers, and without offering them the possibility to refuse such use of their content. Further, it said that the U.S. search giant may have used video and other content uploaded on YouTube to train Google’s generative AI models without compensating creators and without offering them the possibility to refuse such use of their content. The formal antitrust probe follows Google’s rollout of AI-driven search results, which resulted in a drop in traffic to online news sites. Google was fined nearly €3 billion in September for abusing its dominance in online advertising. It has proposed technical remedies over that penalty, but resisted a call by EU competition chief Teresa Ribera to break itself up.

A message from Brussels to Google: Would you break yourself up, please? The search giant faces an early November deadline to say how it intends to comply with a European Commission decision in September, which found that it had illegally maintained its grip on the infrastructure that powers online advertising. With a €2.95 billion fine in the rearview mirror, the Commission and Google find themselves in an unprecedented standoff as Brussels contemplates the once unthinkable: a structural sell-off of part of a U.S. company, preferably voluntary, but potentially forced if necessary. The situation is “very unusual,” said Anne Witt, a professor in competition law at EDHEC Business School in Lille, France. “Structural remedies are almost unprecedented at the EU level,” Witt added. “It’s really the sledgehammer.” In its September decision, the Commission took the “unusual and unprecedented step,” per Witt, to ask Google to design its own remedy — while signaling, if cautiously, that anything short of a sale of parts of its advertising technology business would fall foul of the EU antitrust enforcer. “It appears that the only way for Google to end its conflict of interest effectively is with a structural remedy, such as selling some part of its Adtech business,” Executive Vice President Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s competition chief, said at the time. As the clock counts down to the deadline for Google to tell the Commission what it intends to do, the possibility of a Brussels-ordered breakup of an American tech champion is unlikely to go unnoticed in Washington, even as the Donald Trump administration pursues its own case against the search giant. (Google accounts for 90 percent of the revenues of Alphabet, the $3.3 trillion technology holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California.) Executive Vice President Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s competition chief. | Thierry Monasse/Getty Images Google has said that it will appeal the Commission’s decision, which in its view requires changes that would hurt thousands of European businesses. “There’s nothing anticompetitive in providing services for ad buyers and sellers, and there are more alternatives to our services than ever before,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, its vice president and global head of regulatory affairs, wrote in a blog post in September. PARALLEL PROBES The proposal for a voluntary break up of Google marks the culmination of a decade of EU antitrust enforcement in digital markets in which “behavioral” fixes achieved little, and a unique alignment in both timing and substance between the U.S. and the EU of their parallel probes into the firm’s ad tech empire. “It would have been unthinkable 10 years ago that there would be a case in the U.S.  and a sister case in Europe that had a breakup as a potential outcome,” said Cori Crider, executive director of the Future of Tech Institute, which is advocating for a break-up. The Commission formally launched the investigation into Google’s ad tech stack in 2021, following a drumbeat of complaints from news organizations that had seen Google take control of the high-frequency exchanges where publishers and advertisers agree on the price and placement of online ads.  Google’s control of the exchanges, as well as infrastructure used by both sides of the market, was like allowing Goldman Sachs or Citibank to own the New York Stock Exchange, declared the U.S. Department of Justice in its lawsuit in 2023. It also created a situation in which cash-strapped news organizations on both sides of the Atlantic saw Google eating an increasing share of revenues from online advertising — and ultimately posing a threat to journalism itself. “This is not just any competition law case — this is about the future of journalism,” said Alexandra Geese, a German Green member of the European Parliament. “Publishers don’t have the revenue because they don’t get traffic on their websites, and then Google’s algorithm decides what information we see,” she said. The plight of publishers proved hefty on the other side of the Atlantic too. In April, the federal judge overseeing the U.S. government’s case against Google ruled that the search giant had illegally maintained its monopoly over parts of the ad tech market.   A spokesperson for the company said that the firm disagrees with the Commission’s charges. | Nurphoto via Getty Images The Virginia district court held a two-week trial on remedies in September. The Trump administration has advocated a sale of the exchanges and an unwinding of Google’s 2008 merger with DoubleClick, through which it came to dominate the online ad market. Judge Leonie Brinkema will hear the government’s closing arguments on Nov. 17 and is expected to issue her verdict in the coming months. STARS ALIGN Viewed by Google’s critics, it’s the ideal set of circumstances for the Commission to push for a muscular structural remedy. “If you cannot go for structural remedies now, when the U.S. is on the same page, then you’re unlikely to ever do it,” said Crider. The route to a breakup may, however, be both legally and politically more challenging. Despite the technical alignment, and a disenchantment with the impact that past fines and behavioral remedies have had, the Commission still faces a “big hurdle” when it comes to the legal test, should it not be satisfied with Google’s remedy offer, said Witt. The U.S. legal system is more conducive to ordering breakups, both as a matter of law — judges have a wide scope to remedy a harm to the market — and in tradition, said Witt, noting that the U.S. government’s lawsuits to break up Google and Meta are rooted in precedents that don’t exist in Europe. Caught in the middle is Google, which should file its proposed remedies within 60 days of being served notice of the Commission decision that was announced on Sept. 5. A spokesperson for the company said that the firm disagrees with the Commission’s charges, and therefore with the notion that structural remedies are necessary. The firm is expected to lodge its appeal in the coming days. While Google has floated asset sales to the Commission over the course of the antitrust investigation, only to be rebuffed by Brussels, the firm does not intend to divest the entirety of its ad tech stack, according to a person familiar with the matter who was granted anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case. Ultimately, what happens in Brussels may depend on what happens in the U.S. case. While a court-ordered divestiture of a chunk of Google’s ad tech business is conceivable, U.S. judges have shown themselves to be skeptical of structural remedies in recent months, said Lazar Radic, an assistant law professor at IE University in Madrid, who is affiliated with the big tech-friendly International Center for Law and Economics. “Behavioral alternatives are still on the table,” said Radic, of the U.S. case. The Commission will likely want to align itself with the U.S. should the Virginia court side with the Department of Justice, said Damien Geradin, legal counsel to the European Publishers Council — of which POLITICO parent Axel Springer is a member — that brought forward the case. Conversely, if the court opts for a weaker remedy than is being proposed, the Commission will be obliged to go further, he said. “This is the case where some structural remedies will be needed. I don’t think the [European Commission] can settle for less,” said Geradin.

A U.S. federal judge on Tuesday refused to break up Google for monopolizing the online search and ad markets, and instead imposed lesser restrictions on the tech company’s day-to-day operations. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington rejected the Justice Department’s request to force the $2.5 trillion company to spin off its Chrome browser and Android products. While Google dodged the most severe possible outcome, the judge ordered that the company must share some of its search data with competitors, a penalty that was still narrowed in scope from what the government asked for. Breaking up Google would have immediately made this the largest antitrust remedy in modern history, with the case drawing comparisons to the 1984 breakup of AT&T and the government’s failed bid to split Microsoft in the early 2000s. The decision offers a glimmer of hope for other tech companies facing potential breakups of their businesses, including Meta, Amazon and Apple. Mehta ruled last August that Google locked up 90 percent of the internet search market through a partnership with Apple to be the default search provider on its Safari web browser. Google had similar agreements with handset makers and mobile carriers like Samsung and Verizon. Mehta also found that Google illegally monopolized the market for ads displayed next to search results. That decision came after a 10-week bench trial, and set up what’s called a remedy trial, which took place in April. It was during that second trial that the Justice Department asked Mehta to break up the company to resolve its illegal monopoly. The case spanned two administrations, starting under President Donald Trump’s first term, going to trial under former President Joe Biden, and now Google has pledged to appeal in Trump’s second administration. Google also faces another remedy trial in September for maintaining what a federal judge ruled in April was an illegal monopoly in the almost $300 million U.S. market for digital ads. Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia said Google maintained its monopoly by tying together its ad server business, used by online publishers to manage ad sales on their sites, and its ad exchange business, which auctions off digital advertising space on websites. Google claimed it won half the case and vowed to appeal the other half. Other major antitrust cases remain in the wings that could also drastically reshape the way the tech industry operates in America and across the globe. These cases and investigations come as lawmakers and regulators are worried about tech companies cornering the market for artificial intelligence in a similar fashion as what happened with e-commerce, social media and online search. Amazon is slated to go to trial in early 2027 over claims it squashes competition to rip off sellers and consumers while peddling a subpar shopping experience riddled with confusing advertisements. Apple faces claims its billions of iPhones sold since 2007 were designed to lock users into its products while raising costs for consumers, developers and artists, among others. Depositions and discovery in that case are scheduled through early 2027. And chipmaker Nvidia is the subject of a Justice Department investigation over its purchase of AI start-up Run:ai.

Federal agents searched the Maryland home of John Bolton, former national security adviser during President Donald Trump’s first administration, early Friday, according to two law enforcement officials. “The FBI is conducting court authorized activity in the area. There is no threat to public safety. We have no further comment,” a spokesperson for the FBI’s Washington Field Office said. A Department of Justice spokesperson declined to comment, but referenced Friday morning posts from FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi. “NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission,” Patel posted on X, to which Bondi replied: “America’s safety isn’t negotiable. Justice will be pursued. Always.” Bolton came under investigation in Trump’s first term over a tell-all book about his time as national security adviser, which officials said revealed classified government information. The Justice Department sued Bolton in 2020 in an attempt to block publication of the book. But a judge rejected that effort while also publicly faulting the former national security aide for proceeding without final sign-off from the government. DOJ also conducted a parallel criminal investigation into Bolton’s handling of classified information, but dropped the probe and the suit the following year, after President Joe Biden’s appointees took office. After his time in government, the former Trump adviser became an increasingly strident critic of Trump, attacking his foreign policy and national security moves. Bolton was among a group of former officials whose security details Trump revoked on the first day of his second term, despite active threats on Bolton’s life from Iran. A spokesperson and an attorney who represented Bolton in the earlier probe did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday. Representatives of the publisher of Bolton’s 2020 book, Simon and Schuster, did not immediately return messages seeking comment. Eli Stokols contributed to this report.

BRUSSELS — The EU should ensure fairer competition between news media and digital platforms as it considers a set of wide-ranging initiatives to protect democracy, EU countries propose in a draft document obtained by POLITICO. As part of the European Commission’s Democracy Shield, EU capitals should support an independent, pluralistic media landscape — with a strong emphasis on countering disinformation and Big Tech dominance, the draft says. These platforms act as “gatekeepers” and play a central role in distributing news content, without being directly involved in its production. The draft conclusions, written by the Danish presidency of the Council of the EU in consultation with other countries and the Commission, will be discussed at a July 11 meeting of the Council’s Audiovisual Working Party. The draft calls for a review of editorial responsibility and accountability, particularly for new media-like actors such as AI systems; fairer competition between news media and digital platforms; a possible exemption for media from certain regulations; and to ensure that media policy is part of broader geopolitical, digital, and security strategies. The Democracy Shield, a proposal for which is expected in the autumn, is a Commission initiative to strengthen democracy in the EU, including by fighting disinformation. EU countries previously backed stronger EU rules on prominence measures to promote a pluralistic media landscape, among other things, as the bloc revises its Audiovisual Media Services Directive. “Access to reliable news is a fundamental prerequisite for our democracies to function,” the document reads. “News media therefore play an important democratic role in safeguarding the information sphere, ensuring access to reliable news and upholding vibrant and resilient democracies.”

LONDON — It was never meant to be this hard. In the wake of Labour’s decisive election victory in July, ministers in the party’s tech team were determined to grip an issue they felt the previous Conservative government had failed to address: how to protect copyright holders from artificial intelligence companies’ voracious appetite for content to train their AI models. Instead, Labour’s handling of the issue has snowballed into a PR nightmare which has transformed a largely uncontroversial data bill into a political football. The Data (Use and Access Bill) has ricocheted between the Commons and the Lords in an extraordinarily long incidence of ping-pong, with both Houses digging their heels in and a frenzied lobbying battle on all sides. As one tech industry insider put it: “Everyone has fought dirty and everyone is going to walk away covered in shit.” OPTING OUT Many in the creative sector, which has long viewed Labour as its natural ally in Westminster, hoped the party’s July election victory would work in its favor.  In a manifesto for the creative sectors published while in opposition, the party had vowed to “support, maintain, and promote the U.K.’s strong copyright regime,” stating: “The success of British creative industries to date is thanks in part to our copyright framework.” Instead, just five months later, creatives’ worst fears were realized when ministers proposed allowing AI developers to scrape copyrighted content freely unless artists, publishers and creators “opt out” — putting the onus on creatives to protect their work. The ensuing backlash sparked broadsides from the likes of Paul McCartney and Elton John and a rearguard effort by peers to enshrine protections for creatives. On Monday, peers in the House of Lords voted overwhelmingly to defy the Commons for the fourth time by amending a data bill to enshrine protections for creators, despite Department for Science, Innovation and Technology minister Maggie Jones saying businesses want “certainty, not constitutional crises.” Perhaps more troublingly for Labour, the rancor has fed a perception that the party has allied itself too closely to foreign tech giants in its bid for economic growth — a narrative that could make it more difficult for the government to deliver its plans. HOW DID WE GET HERE? POLITICO spoke to several people familiar with discussions inside the government to understand how a complex — if fiercely contested — debate over intellectual property law became front page news. Many were granted anonymity to speak freely. They all agreed that significant missteps had turned a genuine attempt to resolve the matter into a political nightmare. Creative sector representatives pointed POLITICO to the outsized influence of Matt Clifford, a prolific tech investor who was tapped by Technology Secretary Peter Kyle to draft an “AI Opportunities Action Plan” within days of Labour taking office. Clifford had previously argued that the U.K. should reform its copyright laws to attract AI investment in a report for the previous government on “Pro-innovation regulation” authored with Patrick Vallance, now the U.K.’s science minister. The Tony Blair Institute, which had helped shape the incoming Labour government’s AI policy, also backed the idea. But it was Chris Bryant, a joint minister across the technology and culture departments, who was the driving force behind efforts to resolve a deadlock left behind by the previous government, according to two people close to the process. One creative sector lobbyist accused Bryant of “naiveté” for assuming the main problem was that the “other lot were rubbish,” rather than acknowledging the extent of the technical and political hurdles to a solution. They also argued that Bryant’s role meant there was no distinct voice from the culture department — which acted as a bulwark against reform in the previous government — on what was ostensibly a shared policy. Ministers and officials in the culture department were “slow to organize themselves,” the person said, allowing the technology department to own the issue. IT’S A STITCH-UP When POLITICO revealed in October that the government was planning to propose an “opt out” model, it seemed that creatives had been outmanoeuvred. A subsequent government consultation in December described an “opt out” system, alongside increased transparency obligations on AI firms, as its “preferred option.”  The consultation was “a pivotal opportunity to ensure that sustained growth and innovation for the U.K.’s AI sector continues to benefit creators, businesses and consumers alike,” Bryant said, adding: “We want to provide legal certainty for all.” For copyright holders, the suggestion that the law on AI training was unclear undermined their efforts to extract potentially lucrative licensing deals from AI firms, which partially relied on the threat of pursuing legal action. But by stating a “preferred option” — and accepting all the recommendations in Clifford’s AI plan, which called for copyright reform, one month later — the government created a “target” for itself, a tech industry figure said. The creative sector was able to portray itself as the victim of a stitch up. In a coordinated campaign that stretched from newspaper publishers to record labels, trade bodies called on their A-list networks and sympathetic lawmakers to concoct a steady stream of damning headlines for the government. In May, Elton John labeled Kyle a “moron” on the BBC’s Sunday news show. (“My family thought it was the best thing ever,” Kyle joked this week during an appearance at SXSW in London.) Briefings to the press from figures involved in the campaign highlighted Clifford’s personal AI investments, as well as Kyle’s refusal to meet creatives despite taking a bevy of meetings with Big Tech lobbyists. Kyle’s decision to paint the sector as trying to “resist change” in an interview with the Financial Times didn’t help. Campaigners also accused Kyle of only seeking advice from a small circle of advisers with strong views on AI. Kyle “refuses to go one inch” beyond what’s required in order not to imperil investment from AI firms, one said. Most importantly, the sector found a champion in Beeban Kidron, a former film director and crossbench peer in the House of Lords. A formidable campaigner, Kidron had previous form holding minsters’ feet to the fire over online safety. In coordination with the wider campaign, Kidron tabled a series of amendments to a data bill before parliament to push for immediate transparency duties on AI firms that would force them to disclose how they train their AI models. “What the government is doing is bad politics, bad economics and bad for the culture and reputation of the U.K.,” Kidron said. “They will live to regret their short-sighted awe and the failure to be adults in the room.” FACE THE MUSIC In private, ministers railed against what they felt was misleading and inflammatory coverage of their genuine attempt to resolve a knotty issue. But “there was no way we could have campaigned the way we did without the ‘preferred option,’” the creative sector lobbyist quoted at the top of the article said. Liberal Democrat peer Tim Clement-Jones, who has backed Kidron’s efforts, told POLITICO the government “put the cart before the horse.” “It completely destroyed trust,” he said. In response to Kidron’s campaigning, ministers have promised to publish technical reports on transparency, technical solutions to an “opt out,” licensing, and other subjects within nine months. Cross-industry working groups will be formed to weigh in on the questions and seek to cultivate consensus. Most significantly, ministers now say they no longer have a “preferred option” on the way forward, and insist the U.K.’s existing law is clear — though Kyle maintains the U.K.’s laws are “not fit for purpose” in the AI era. “We’re open-minded,” a DSIT official said. In May, Kyle told MPs he “regrets” the timing and framing of the government’s proposals, accepting they inflamed creatives and almost derailed the government’s legislative agenda. “We all should have done things differently,” a senior tech executive agreed. WHERE NEXT? The senior tech executive argued that an “opt out” with proportionate transparency duties on AI firms ultimately remains the best way forward. Getting there won’t be easy, however. It is unclear if, and when, technology will emerge that could allow rights holders to easily and effectively “opt out” of AI firms training new models on the full range of media spread across the web. And finding consensus on what constitutes adequate transparency — which ministers say will be “the foundation” of any legislation that could emerge within the next two years — will also be challenging. Leading AI companies OpenAI and Google have already made it clear that they view “disproportionate” transparency requirements as a threat to their business models. Tim Flagg, CEO of UKAI, which represents U.K. businesses adopting AI, said the trade body “has been on a journey” over the issue. After initially supporting liberalization of the law, he told POLITICO he now believes the U.K. stands to benefit most by carving out a niche developing smaller, more specialized AI systems using high quality, licensed content. But others in the tech world have only hardened their position. Some of the largest tech firms have responded to the creative sector’s campaign by adopting even more extreme positions in a bid to “balance” the debate, according to multiple people familiar with their thinking. It is understood that the vast majority of the 11,500 responses submitted to the government’s consultation are from creators opposed to the government’s plans. Industry bodies including TechUK, which previously advocated for reforms mirroring the government’s original “preferred option,” now describe it as a reluctant “compromise.” But rights holders may also struggle to sell any eventual compromise to artists and creators after taking such an uncompromising public position, the tech industry figure cited above said. “What people [in the creative sector] are saying in private is very different to what they are saying in public,” they said, noting that many of the groups involved in the campaign had been in discussions with tech firms until relations soured. Ahead of a near unprecedented fourth round of ping pong on the data bill, a tearful Chris Bryant on Tuesday begged peers to allow the data bill to “run its course,” saying he had “heard the concerns” and would address them in the round in future legislation. Lobbyists are rolling up their sleeves. In a statement to POLITICO, a DSIT spokesperson said: “We recognize how pressing these issues are and we truly want to solve them, which is why we have committed to bring forward the publication of our report exploring the breadth of issues raised in the AI and copyright debate, alongside an economic impact assessment covering a range of possible options.  “We have also been clear the way to arrive at a solution is to ensure we are meeting the needs of both sectors, rather than trying to force through piecemeal changes to unrelated legislation which could quickly become outdated. “As you would rightly expect, we are taking the time to consider the 11,500 responses to our consultation, but no changes to copyright law will be considered unless we’re completely satisfied they work for creators.”

One after another, a parade of the wealthiest and most elite institutions in American life since last November have found themselves confronted by unprecedented demands from President Donald Trump and his team of retribution-seekers. One after another, these establishment pillars have met these demands with the same response: capitulation and compliance. The details are varied but two themes are consistent. The first is an effort — far more organized and disciplined than any precedent from Trump’s first term — to bring institutions who have earned the president’s ire to heel. The second theme is even more surprising: The swiftness with which supposedly powerful and supposedly independent institutions have responded — with something akin to the trembling acquiescence of a child surrendering his lunch money to a big kid on the morning walk to school. Cumulatively, the cases represent an astonishing new chapter in the history of the American establishment: The Great Grovel. Prestigious law firms have cowered at his threats to tank their business; Paul, Weiss, which fought against Trump in his first term, pledged $40 million in pro bono legal services to issues Trump has supported. And Skadden Arps, one of the largest law firms in the world, reached a deal with Trump to provide $100 million in free legal work to administration-friendly causes — before Trump had taken any action against them. One of the country’s most storied news networks, ABC News, settled a defamation lawsuit with Trump for $15 million that will go to his future presidential library, and another, CBS News, appears poised to settle for millions more. The Washington Post and the LA Times, both legacy papers owned by Trump-friendly billionaires, have adjusted the content of their editorial pages in ways that pleased the White House. And Columbia University, alma mater to Alexander Hamilton, agreed to nine policy changes in an effort to unfreeze $400 million in federal funding. Other universities hired Republican lobbyists to stay on the president’s good side. A team of POLITICO reporters in recent days set out to illuminate the common threads between these diverse episodes. They interviewed key figures at institutions who have been targeted, as well as people in and around Trump’s circle. Here are four conclusions: A TRANSACTIONAL AGE Leaders of the institutions who have complied with Trump’s demands do not accept the White House’s idea that the basic premises of American governance have changed, and a New Normal has arrived. Quite the contrary, what people are yearning for is a return to the Old Normal, in which familiar revenue lines and profit margins stay intact. When Brad Karp, chair of Paul, Weiss sent a firm-wide letter on March 23 justifying his decision to make a deal with Trump, he emphasized “the need to ensure, above all, that our firm would survive.” Trump’s executive order, which mirrors ones he has issued about firms WilmerHale, Perkins Coie and Jenner & Block, stripped attorneys of security clearances and restricted their ability to do federal work. It was, in Karp’s own words, an “existential” threat to the firm. But there is deep concern among firm alumni that their former boss’s decision to make a deal with Trump will pave the way for other concessions to the administration. Last week, more than 100 alumni sent a letter to Karp calling the deal a “permanent stain on the face of a great firm that sought to gain a profit by forfeiting its soul.” Former attorneys at Paul, Weiss granted anonymity to speak candidly about the firm say Karp’s decision also reflects a shift in power and strategic focus over the last eight years. Paul, Weiss’s corporate practice has greatly expanded since the days of the first Trump administration. In 2017, when the firm was sending partners to work 12 hour shifts at airports as part of their response to Trump’s Muslim travel ban, revenue was just over $1 billion. Last year, the firm reported more than $2 billion in revenue, according to Law.com. “You bring people together on the corporate side, you’re not intent on fighting,” one person said. “Whereas on the litigation side you have to be a fighter.” Meanwhile Skadden’s executive partner Jeremy London shared details of his negotiation in a firm-wide email sent Friday and obtained by POLITICO. He had learned the Trump administration intended to issue an executive order aimed at the firm. “We chose to engage proactively and constructively with the Administration to align on a productive path forward without the issuance of an executive order,” he wrote. “We entered into the agreement the President announced today because, when faced with the alternatives, it became clear that it was the best path to protect our clients, our people and our Firm.” The firms seem to have made a calculated decision that going along with Trump’s demands would, like some sort of rubber-gloved procedure at the doctor’s office, be unpleasant for a moment but would lead swiftly to business as usual. There have been exceptions: Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block and WilmerHale, Big Law firms targeted by Trump with similar punishment, have opted to fight him in court. But even Trump is surprised by the scale of the capitulation: “They’re all bending and saying, ‘Sir, thank you very much,’” Trump said, speaking at a White House event for Women’s History Month Wednesday. “Nobody can believe it, including law firms that have been so horrible… and they’re just saying, where do I sign?” PRESSURE POINTS Trump’s actions have illuminated more vividly than ever just how many wealthy private institutions have their finances and policies enmeshed with the federal government — though it is hardly a new phenomenon. What is different is the willingness of Trump and his lieutenants to use this leverage so unabashedly. Along the way, he has revealed the institutions to be more vulnerable to intimidation than their leaders themselves may have recognized. Earlier this month Columbia moved to comply with nine demands by the Trump administration in order to potentially unfreeze $400 million in U.S. federal research funding — a major blow to the school, which relies on about $1.3 billion in government grants each year to support its $6.3 billion annual operating budget. The university, which has changed its policies to better support Jewish students after pro-Palestinian protests rocked the campus last year, had already considered many of the changes, according to a person with knowledge of the deliberations who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. Those included rules that would compel masked protesters to reveal their identities, and deputizing campus public safety officers to make arrests. “We have been advancing our work to address discrimination and harassment for months in a variety of ways, including engagement with government agencies to address ongoing concerns,” a Columbia spokesperson said in a statement to POLITICO. But leaders at the university also knew “lifesaving research” would be “seriously curtailed” without the $400 million in research funding, the person said. Taking the actions, the Trump administration made clear, would be the only path toward getting it back. The dynamics at work in the Great Grovel reveal a paradox. In theory, wealthy institutions with more diverse revenue lines should be more insulated from outside pressure. In practice, the opposite seems true, since these wealthy interests perceive more points of vulnerability — and, from the other perspective, potential profit — they therefore have more incentive to get along and go along. The decision to settle the libel case was deeply unpopular at ABC News, where many journalists thought an independent news entity needed to defend itself vigorously. But ABC is only a small part of the Walt Disney Corp., where executives apparently decided defending the suit risked embarrassment because of the legal discovery process and could harm the larger business. “It sent a chilling message to the newsroom that they could be sold out by the higher ups and by the corporate division” at Disney, said a person who works with Disney granted anonymity to speak candidly. A Disney spokesperson declined to comment. Likewise, it is hard to imagine an earlier generation of Washington Post publishers contributing $1 million to a president’s inaugural fund. But that is what Post owner Jeff Bezos did for Trump. And Amazon, the company he founded and where he remains a key shareholder, reportedly signed a $40 million deal with Melania Trump to distribute a documentary about her, along with other content projects. THE IMBALANCE OF POWER Much of the credit for Trump’s new sense of ideological purpose in the second term has focused on top advisors like Stephen Miller or budget director Russ Vought. Both have played roles in the administration’s effort to use executive branch leverage against institutions outside the government. But the retribution campaign is much more of a team effort, involving Trump allies across agencies and even outside advisors. “Retribution is an important component of justice,” said Mike Davis, a Trump ally who runs an outside judicial advocacy group. “It restores the victims and serves as a powerful deterrent.” Davis is one of a handful of outside Trump advisers developing strategies to go after the president’s political enemies. The push against the law firms is driven from the outside by longtime Trump aides Boris Epshteyn and Jason Miller, though Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has also been involved, two people familiar with the conversations, granted anonymity to discuss details of them, said. On the inside, Stephen Miller plays a role. While Trump enjoys a wide array of support, his targets typically have found themselves alone and isolated. “There’s a giant collective action problem because everybody’s looking out for number one,” said the person who works with Disney. There has been no effective effort so far by universities to work in concert to halt Trump’s actions at Columbia or other campuses. Kicking the Associated Press out of the White House pool prompted howls by other reporters, but most news organizations basically kept on with their ordinary business. Major law firms haven’t released a joint statement condemning Trump’s moves against their industry colleagues. “If law firms and businesses and others within the private sector choose not to stand up and front a resistance to this power that [Trump] is claiming, but which the Constitution does not give him, then he will have that power,” said Mary Spooner, who worked at Paul, Weiss for more than a decade. “But it becomes much, much harder to resist when individual organizations and institutions and corporations are forced to resist alone.” HUMILIATION IS THE POINT Trump’s campaign against institutions has some ideological origins—grounded in antipathy to what critics see as illegitimate government subsidies or the alleged “wokeness” of their internal practices on such matters as diversity, equity and inclusion. On equal footing with these motivations, however, is a psychological dimension. Trump targeted law firms that employed attorneys who have investigated him or fought him in court. He’s going after media organizations for perceived partisan bias or anti-Trump sentiment. His grudge against Columbia dates back to the 1990s, when he had attempted to sell the school property on the Upper West Side for upward of $400 million, the New York Times reported, and walked out of a meeting with trustees when they offered significantly less. Then, last spring, Columbia became the center of a global student protest movement of pro-Palestinian encampments — and an elite, urban, progressive school for Republicans to turn into an example. According to people near the negotiations, Trump and his supporters care as much or more about public rituals of self-abasement— as in the ABC and law firm settlements — as they do about the substantive details of the original disputes. In the eyes of critics, Trump has for a lifetime caressed his grievances as if he were supervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld stroking his cat. “What you see here is a group of people who think they missed an opportunity the first time around — that they didn’t fully realize what they now believe to be the powers of the presidency and they didn’t maximize Trump’s indiscriminate, narcissistic, vengeful nature,” said Ty Cobb, a former White House lawyer during the first Trump administration. “They’re playing to Trump’s strengths, which is as a mob boss.” It is far from clear from the reporting, however, that Trump’s team would regard this as an insult. To the contrary, people in his orbit are pleased that the whole world can now see what they already knew: In Trump’s four years out of power, he and his allies were thinking hard about what they would use their power for if they got it back. Daniel Barnes, Dasha Burns, Daniel Lippman, Megan Messerly and Irie Sentner contributed to this report

LONDON — British officials are examining the national security implications of DeepSeek, whose AI model has caused panic in Silicon Valley and sparked fears China has stolen a march in the global tech race. The Chinese company released a model this month, called R1, to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT, saying it was trained at a fraction of the cost. The free app has shot to the top of Apple’s App Store chart, ahead of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Speaking to POLITICO from Brussels on Wednesday, Britain’s Technology Secretary Peter Kyle said: “We scrutinize every innovation of the size and scale and impact of DeepSeek and we will make sure that it goes through the right system. “We have a very mature intelligence and security apparatus in the United Kingdom. “It’s a very regular occurrence that new technologies, new products will emerge onto the global economy and I just want to reassure people in Britain … the system that we have will look at this as it does at every other innovation and make sure that safety is there from the onset.” Kyle did not detail the exact nature of the probe, but Britain’s National Cyber Security Center — a division of the GCHQ surveillance agency — is known to scan for future technological risks. The development has already sparked enquiries from data regulators in Italy, Ireland and Australia and drawn the attention of the U.S. national security apparatus. Italy’s data regulator said Tuesday it had sent DeepSeek requests to disclose what personal data it collects, where it comes from, how it’s used, what legal basis it has to process that data under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and whether that data is stored on servers in China. There are growing concerns amongst German data protection authorities over the app too, with Zeit reporting that authorities are investigating potential regulatory steps — starting with a formal inquiry into the company’s data processing practices. Research from NewsGuard, a U.S.-based company which provides publishers with accuracy ratings, placed DeepSeek one from bottom in its veracity tests of similar chatbots. It also found the chatbot acted as a “mouthpiece for China” in some of its responses.  But Kyle argued there were some positives to DeepSeek’s rise, saying it showed the importance of innovation — and linked it to his Cabinet colleague Rachel Reeves’ flurry of growth-focused announcements on Wednesday. “That’s why in the U.K. … we’ve launched the AI action plan, why we are building up our digital capacity, why we are… announcing a link between Cambridge and Oxford universities. We’re going to create one of the biggest clusters in the world of innovation,” he said. Chris Lunday contributed to this report.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk is attempting to interfere with Germany’s upcoming national election in February, a government spokesperson said Monday.  “It is indeed the case that Elon Musk is trying to influence the federal election,” a government spokesperson told reporters. While Musk was free to express his opinions, “freedom of opinion also covers the greatest nonsense,” she added.  The German government will stay on Musk’s platform X for the time being, she said. The warning comes a day after the Tesla CEO doubled down on his support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in an opinion piece in the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag. He argued that the AfD was the “last spark of hope” for the country. While the conservative Christian Democratic Union is leading the polls with 30 percent, the far-right AfD is in second place with 19 percent, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls. Musk’s comments caused major political backlash. “Elon Musk is attempting nothing less than Vladimir Putin,” Lars Klingbeil, the leader of the ruling Social Democrats, said to German publisher Funke Mediengruppe. Both Putin and Musk want to see anti-democratic forces succeed in the elections, causing Germany to be “plunged into chaos,” he added.  The tech titan’s goal is to increase his wealth, another Social Democrat politician, Saskia Esken, said Monday. “He wants to become even richer. And everything he does, he does with precisely this goal in mind.”  Friedrich Merz, the lead candidate for the conservative Christian Democrats, criticized Musk’s comments as “intrusive and presumptuous.” He warned that the AfD’s anti-EU stance and their proposed exit from the European Union — which has been dubbed “Dexit” — would ruin the German economy. Musk should not forget, that “it was the AfD that voiced the strongest opposition to” building his Tesla factory in Germany, he added. The tech tycoon opened the company’s first European gigafactory in the German state of Brandenburg in 2022. Musk has not responded to the backlash. But he reposted a photo from the AfD’s chancellor candidate, Alice Weidel, who used Musk’s opinion piece for her party’s election campaign, and has previously called for Chancellor Olaf Scholz to resign. He has recently supported several European populist, right-wing politicians, such as Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.