BRUSSELS — The European Union is under pressure to keep Ukrainian troops fully online after Elon Musk’s Starlink was restricted amid volatile U.S. support for Kyiv. “It was a very dangerous and unpleasant surprise,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters after EU leaders met in Brussels, referring to Starlink speed limitations experienced by military troops in recent days. “We were using Starlink to intercept jet-powered Shaheds [combat drones] that are attacking our civilian infrastructure and killing our families … When the speed limits were lowered, we became incapable of shooting [them] down.” Ukraine has long relied critically on Musk’s satellite constellation for wartime efforts. Reuters reported Friday that the order to slow Ukraine’s military-grade Starshield service came from the White House, days after Washington pressed Kyiv to halt strikes on Russian refineries, amid soaring energy prices and ahead of November’s midterm elections. “It is unacceptable for Ukraine’s defense — and therefore Europe’s security — to depend on the goodwill of a single American billionaire or on Donald Trump’s decisions,” French centrist Member of the European Parliament Christophe Grudler told POLITICO. Ahead of Thursday’s high-level meeting, European lawmakers had been calling on the EU executive to fast-track Kyiv’s access to satellite capabilities already pooled under the bloc’s Govsatcom program — which gives participating governments secure communications capabilities. Negotiations between the EU executive and Ukraine over this access have been ongoing since March, with no breakthrough. Norway and Iceland secured such an agreement earlier this year. “What I don’t understand is why the European Commission and the Member States have not done everything possible to quickly reach an agreement that would allow Ukraine to benefit from it,” added Christophe Grudler, who wrote to EU leaders. He also called on them to speed up work on IRIS² — the EU’s in-house, planned satellite network and full-fledged match to Starlink, which is only expected to come online in 2030. Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier confirmed in a statement that it is “currently in talks with Ukraine to fully associate” the country with the EU’s Govsatcom program. “The war in Ukraine shows that our security also depends on space. And the EU has been doing quite a lot. We are ready to support Ukraine where we can support Ukraine,” he added. Calls to crack down on dependence on foreign providers and boost alternatives to Starlink also come at a time when legislators are negotiating a series of laws that could tame Musk’s ambitions in Europe. “Ukraine’s dependence on Starlink highlights the vulnerability of European defence systems that rely on U.S. technology, Another reminder that Europe must reduce its dangerous technological dependencies — ASAP,” center-right Finnish lawmaker Aura Salla said on social media. Policymakers across Europe have been joining forces to curb Starlink’s dominance in low-Earth orbit, where satellites fly close to Earth to deliver faster connections. “As legislators, we must ensure that European operators are well positioned in the market and limit the dominance of foreign players,” German center-left lawmaker Matthias Ecke said. In Brussels, lawmakers, including Ecke, are backing European telcos gunning for prized satellite frequencies, currently licensed to U.S. operators until next year and eyed by Starlink. Meanwhile, Zelenskyy said Ukraine was working bilaterally with EU countries to secure more capabilities, citing France. He also expressed hopes that Starlink restrictions could be lifted. “My partners told me there were signals from the White House that they would return these capabilities.” SpaceX — Starlink’s parent company — didn’t respond to POLITICO’s request for comment.

DUBLIN — The Irish capital, which doubles as Europe’s de facto tech capital, hosted two very different AI summits in the past week. Most eyes were on the International AI Summit, the signature tech event of Ireland’s six-month presidency of the Council of the EU, where top brass from the world’s biggest tech firms discussed ways to harness artificial intelligence and minimize safety risks. But the weekend before, a very different conversation was taking place at the Workers’ AI Counter Summit, as Ireland’s tech workers demanded a say in how the burgeoning technology reshapes the workplace and society. Ireland’s lucrative tech sector has been rattled by waves of AI-driven layoffs — and the country’s fledgling tech union has seen an exponential spike in sign-ups from workers who are worried about their future.   There’s an “awakening” happening right now among workers in Ireland’s tech sector, and a growing “awareness that they’re not bulletproof,” said Sinéad Gibney, a social democrat lawmaker who previously worked for Google.   “I do think what we will see is that parts of roles will be automated, which means that people will be competing more heavily for the same roles,” she said. “They won’t have the same labor power and therefore we’re going to see a drop in quality of work, we’re going to see more zero-hour contracts, in more places than we already see it.” The labor movement brewing in Ireland, where many of the world’s tech giants have their EU bases, is part of a wider trend among tech workers globally, who have seen their work disrupted by rapidly evolving AI. RISE IN LAYOFFS Ireland’s dedicated union for tech workers, the Digital and Techworker Alliance (DATA), has seen a five-fold increase in membership since it was first founded in 2023.   In its first year and a half of existence, membership hovered around 270 people. In the past year-and-a-half, it’s jumped to more than 1,350 members, DATA organizer John Bohan told POLITICO.  He added that this number tends to spike around layoffs and other actions. “The tech industry was founded on the idea that it would never have a union, because they’re making people rich, and treat them really well,” Bohan said.  “But post-Covid, workforce adjustments happened again and again, with layoffs and declining conditions in the sector. We started to see more people wanting to get organized around redundancies.”   The spike in sign-ups coincides with a wave of layoffs in Ireland’s tech bubble (and the tech sector globally), as companies corrected pandemic-era overhiring, and diverted investment to AI.   Ireland hosts the EU headquarters of most of the world’s largest tech companies, and more than 170,000 people are employed in the tech sector, according to the country’s statistics institute. Social media giant Meta has roughly halved its workforce in Ireland since the pandemic, axing well over 1,000 roles to offset AI investment and boost efficiency. Separately, Meta subcontractor Covalen also announced massive layoffs earlier this year, cutting more than 700 people.   Video-sharing platform TikTok announced this year it would shed around 300 Irish jobs, mostly from its trust and safety team, shifting the work to other countries, outsourced vendors or automated AI solutions.   A report by the IMF earlier this year warned that Ireland’s labor market is “relatively more exposed” to AI than many advanced economies, partly due to its concentration of tech workers.   The AI race is also creating new jobs on the Irish market – as AI firms like Anthropic and OpenAI are setting up Irish bases and trying to lure Big Tech workers with even bigger salaries.   Amid the uncertainty and volatility of the AI boom, tech workers are turning to unions for the first time as a safety net. One tech worker who used to work in trust and safety at a big tech firm told POLITICO that there used to be a feeling that as a “pampered” tech worker you “can’t ask for your rights, because you already have it so much better.”  But as layoffs continue and teams get leaner, workers in fields like trust and safety “now have to deal with these issues with fewer and fewer resources”, and face a “constant threat of being chopped,” the worker said.   That’s causing an “undoing of a certain perspective that we have of ourselves as tech sector workers,” they said, “because of undeniable experiences that now put us in situations where we clearly see our rights being violated, even if we may have it so much or somewhat better than most people.”  A different tech worker who currently works for Covalen told POLITICO that there is a sense that “if they believe they can replace you with AI, they will do that.”   “All these Big Tech firms only care about profit, and what I have realized is the Irish government protects that Big Tech capital [rather than workers],” the Covalen worker said. “But the question is, what’s the government going to do when the tech bros change their mind and move elsewhere?”   WORKERS AT THE CENTER The speaker list at this week’s AI summit was a flex of the country’s strength as a tech hub, as top names from the world’s biggest companies like Google and Microsoft took to the stage. Fionnuala Ní Bhrógáin, head of organizing and campaigning at Ireland’s Communications Workers’ Union (DATA’s parent union), was the only union voice on the line-up. “The fact that 36 executives and industry bosses featured on the program, compared with just one trade union speaker — invited at the last minute after attention was drawn to the absence of workers’ voices — says a lot about the value the Irish government places on AI’s impact on workers,” she told POLITICO. “The reality is that a meaningful conversation about AI’s future can only happen through genuine engagement with workers and collective bargaining,” Ní Bhrógáin added. “Without that voice, we risk deepening mistrust and resistance rather than creating the conditions for workers to shape these changes collectively.” DATA organized its counter-AI summit the previous weekend, to put “workers at the center of the debate about power, AI, technology and the future of work.”  The event cut through the “hype and futurism of politicians and industry figures to focus on the real present harms faced by ordinary workers and communities,” DATA’s Bohan said.   The union is pushing for stronger legal protections for tech workers caught up in AI-driven layoffs in Ireland, including making it mandatory for employers to recognize unions during collective bargaining. It is also calling for a ban on cooling-off clauses that prevent laid-off workers from moving between Big Tech subcontractors.   A spokesperson for Ireland’s department for enterprise told POLITICO in a written statement that the government is “committed to strengthening collective bargaining and industrial relations” and has published an action plan to do so between now and 2030.   They said that employers already have to comply with obligations under Irish employment law, including consultation and notification procedures for collective redundancies, and workers who feel those rules have been broken can complain to the Workplace Relations Commission.  Firefighting to future-proofing  Naoise Ó Cearúil, a center-right Fianna Fáil lawmaker who chairs the AI committee, pointed out that while there have been high-profile job cuts in Ireland’s tech sector, “the actual net is that there has been an increase [in jobs], particularly over the past year and even five years.”  According to Ireland’s central statistics office, total employment in tech and related sectors surpassed 177,000 in the second quarter of this year, up from around 144,000 at the same time in 2021.   Ó Cearúil pointed out that many job losses were in trust and safety jobs like content moderation that are “very difficult mentally,” and now tech firms are able to “utilize AI and software to be able to do a lot of detection, rather than using humans.”   He has called for a national program to be established, to support workers whose jobs are at risk due to AI and automation.   A spokesperson for Ireland’s department of enterprise acknowledged that the country’s tech sector has “experienced significant adjustment in recent years,” but said the changes were generally part of wider global restructuring “rather than reflecting any Ireland-specific weakness.”  They said the Irish government is currently focused on “ensuring workers and businesses are equipped to adapt to technological change through investment in education, training, lifelong learning and digital skills.”  

Spain’s youth minister has intensified Madrid’s clash with Big Tech after suggesting the country may need to curb — or even ban — access to Elon Musk’s social media platform X due to the “flagrant violations of fundamental rights” taking place there. Speaking Wednesday at a digital activism event in Barcelona, Sira Rego, a United Left politician in Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s governing coalition, said “the next battle would have to be oriented to limit and probably ban Twitter [X]” because the platform has become “a space in which we are seeing flagrant violations of fundamental rights.” Rego flagged controversies including sexual deepfake images generated by X’s AI chatbot Grok. Rego called the current digital space “undemocratic” and controlled by “a few digital strongmen,” framing possible limits on X as part of a broader push to reclaim sovereignty from powerful tech giants. Her push underscores how Europe’s struggle to police the digital public square is accelerating, with Spain increasingly at the center. The comments come as Sánchez advances plans to bar under-16s from social media, a proposal expected to reach the Council of Ministers next week. Big Tech isn’t happy. X boss Elon Musk has branded Sánchez a “tyrant,” while Telegram founder Pavel Durov warned that “Pedro Sánchez’s government is pushing dangerous new regulations that threaten your internet freedoms … [and] could turn Spain into a surveillance state under the guise of ‘protection’.” He added that the measures risk mass data collection and censorship. The clash lands amid a broader transatlantic fight over tech rules. U.S. lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday blasted Europe’s Digital Services Act as “draconian,” while several EU countries, including France, Greece, Denmark and Italy, are pursuing their own youth access restrictions. Australia has already enacted a ban.

The German competition authority hit Amazon with a €59 million fine on Thursday after finding the e-commerce giant’s pricing rules for third-party vendors to be in breach of national and EU competition rules. The authority determined that Amazon’s practices, and in particular its use of algorithms to influence pricing by sellers and the enforcement of its Fair Pricing Policy, are in breach of Germany’s digital dominance rules as well as EU competition law. “Amazon competes directly with marketplace sellers on its platform and influences the prices of its competitors, including through price caps, which is problematic from a competition standpoint,” Andreas Mundt, president of the Federal Cartel Office, or Bundeskartellamt, said in a statement. The agency takes issue with Amazon’s pricing restrictions, and in particular its pricing cap, on what third-party sellers can charge without being penalized under the platform’s rules. “We will vigorously challenge the FCO’s conclusion, which is based on unique German regulation and directly conflicts with EU competition law consumer standards,” said Rocco Bräuniger, Amazon’s country manager for Germany, in a statement. Per Bräuniger, the agency is forcing Amazon to promote uncompetitive prices to customers. The decision follows a preliminary assessment sent to Amazon in June 2025, after which the company submitted comments. The Bundeskartellamt had designated Amazon as a company of paramount significance for competition across markets in July 2022, a finding upheld by the Federal Court of Justice in April 2024. 

Donald Trump has aborted his threat to take Greenland by force but online the war is just getting started. The United States president in January shocked Europe with threats of tariffs to support his right to own Greenland, an autonomous territory of the Danish kingdom. While the intensity of those threats has subsided for now, Danish and European officials say the small island remains vulnerable to the power wielded by the U.S. administration online. With a population of under 60,000, the tiniest drop of misinformation can spread quickly and significantly affect public opinion — especially when the false narrative is coming not from anonymous Russian troll farms but from the most powerful politician in the Western world. “Greenland is a target of influence campaigns of various kinds,” Denmark’s Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard told POLITICO, with one goal of such campaigns “to create division in the relationship between Denmark and Greenland.” In the last year disinformation has increased in Greenland, said Thomas Hedin, editor-in-chief of Danish fact-checker TjekDet. While the influx has lacked any “structured campaign,” including from Russia, Hedin cited as an example of disinformation the idea that the U.S. could buy Greenland — a message repeated by Trump but that is impossible under the Danish constitution, Hedin said. The fact that Greenland is not part of the EU means that the bloc’s social media law — which obliges platforms to consider and mitigate threats of misinformation to civic discourse — does not apply to Greenland, Denmark’s digital ministry told POLITICO.  While polls show that Greenlandic people still favor integration with Europe, German Greens lawmaker Sergey Lagodinsky said the EU needs to prepare for a “new type of hybrid confrontation” over the island. “It’s no more combatting Russian trolls trying to hack the system. If pointed at the EU and Greenland, the disinformation campaigns on U.S. platforms become the system,” he said. RIPE FOR EXPLOITATION The relationship between Denmark and Greenland is particularly ripe for exploitation, said Signe Ravn-Højgaard, co-founder and CEO of Denmark-based Digital Infrastructure Think Tank, who conducted an analysis on the misinformation landscape in Greenland.   With a population the size of a Brussels municipality, news travels fast in Greenland and there are few media outlets that can debunk information. Most people rely on Facebook, said Ravn-Højgaard. With only a few shares, a fake news story can reach the entire population.   “It’s completely different from how it is in Denmark,” she said. If in a city of 20,000 people, 5,000 people believe something false, “it’s not a danger to the democracy of Denmark.” But in Greenland, “that would firstly, quickly spread to everyone, and secondly, it’s a large percentage of the population,” she said.   Organized foreign interference campaigns haven’t appeared in Greenland yet, according to two researchers that POLITICO spoke to, but misinformation has been spreading. Two members of the Greenlandic government, Fisheries Minister Peter Borg and Labour Minister Aqqaluaq Egede, pleaded with the public to “stand in unity” on social media in the face of threats from the U.S.   EU lawmakers have also sounded the alarm. Greens lawmaker Alexandra Geese said to “expect influence operations using state-of-the-art propaganda campaigns as well as hate and harassment campaigns against political figures in Greenland and Denmark.” TRANSPARENCY While Denmark said it has no legal obligation to enforce the bloc’s platform law, the Digital Services Act, on Greenland territory, several lawmakers say that should change. Geese said that the EU should enforce the law, “making sure algorithms respect users’ choices rather than acting in the interest of the same tech oligarchs who are investing in Greenland’s minerals.” That’s despite the fact that the EU has struggled to show tangible results elsewhere so far. The European Commission hasn’t concluded any of its investigations on risks to elections and civic discourse despite having probes open on four platforms including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, TikTok and X. As well as getting platforms to make changes to their systems, the DSA could also help bring transparency to the online ecosystem. The law requires platforms to be transparent about paid ads and data — something Greenland is lacking, said Ravn-Højgaard. Ravn-Højgaard cited paid ads that ran on Facebook ahead of the territory’s election in March 2025, which were not available on the platform’s transparency database. Lagodinsky said the EU should set up an “ad hoc expert group explicitly focused on Greenland.” Brussels should also increase support to fact-checking networks and civil society organizations, he said, similar to the support offered in countries like Moldova and Ukraine.

PARIS — Prosecutors in Paris opened an investigation Wednesday into allegations that Chinese citizens had sought to capture sensitive French government and military data using Starlink. “Four people were brought before the investigating judge for indictment, with two of them being remanded in custody,” the public prosecutor’s office said in a statement. Investigators are looking into possible acts of “delivering information to a foreign power or a company or organization under foreign control, or to their agents, in a manner likely to harm the fundamental interests of [France],” the statement added — a crime that can lead to up to 15 years in prison. The prosecutor’s office said police had been notified last week that the arrested pair were suspected of conducting satellite interception operations from an AirBnB they had rented in the Gironde region, near the city of Bordeaux, after neighbors noticed that “a satellite dish approximately two meters in diameter” had been installed and local residents were experiencing internet outages. “The device installed was used to illegally intercept satellite downlinks, including exchanges between military entities of vital importance,” the statement added. On their visa application to enter France, the suspects said they worked for a company that focuses on “smart beams, signal recognition and satellite networks, and cooperates with universities establishing military-oriented projects.” POLITICO has reached out to the Chinese Embassy in Paris for a comment.

BRUSSELS — The European Parliament’s top trade lawmakers failed on Wednesday to reach a common position on the EU-U.S. trade deal, in a move that risks fueling Washington’s impatience against the EU’s slow pace in finally implementing its side of a bargain struck last summer. Negotiations will continue until next week, two people who attended a meeting of the lawmakers told POLITICO. One said that committee vote was penciled in for Feb. 24 and a final plenary vote for March. Both were granted anonymity to discuss the closed-door talks. The meeting failed to clear remaining hurdles regarding the Parliament’s position on the removal of tariffs on U.S. industrial goods and lobsters — a precondition for Washington to reduce its own tariffs on European cars.  Lawmakers from the international trade committee disagreed on the length of a sunset clause which would limit the proposals’ application to 18 to 36 months, as well as whether the EU should withdraw any tariff concessions until a solution is found between Brussels and Washington on the 50 percent tariff the Trump administration has put on steel derivatives. With the EU still processing the shock of Trump’s threats against the territorial sovereignty of Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark, the liberal Renew group and the Socialists & Democrats are pushing to Trump-proof the deal by inserting suspension clauses into enabling legislation in case the U.S. president turns hostile again.  The center-right European People’s Party has pushed to sign off the deal following calls from EU leaders to unfreeze the implementation of the deal.  Failure to reach an agreement on Wednesday throws into disarray the timeline for parliamentary approval, and further delays the start of negotiations with EU capitals and the European Commission.

BRUSSELS — European lawmakers from three left-leaning parties said Wednesday the EU should investigate TikTok over allegations of censorship in favor of the right. One of TikTok’s new owners as of late January is a Donald Trump ally, Oracle’s Larry Ellison. Users say that since the change in ownership, the platform has censored hot-button issues in favor of the president and his political camp, according to reports — including limiting posts about the Epstein files and protests against U.S. border agents in Minnesota. TikTok said some users have experienced disruption due to technical issues. On Wednesday the group of 32 lawmakers asked the European Commission, in charge of enforcing the EU’s platform rules on TikTok to open another investigation into the platform to verify if it is “causing a systemic risk” to freedom of expression and civic discourse. “Users have reported issues with uploading videos, reduced reach, and unusually low view counts, for content that mention the words Epstein, ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and Minnesota” and some of the signatories “can personally attest that the same episodes — glitches and frozen videos” also happened in Berlin and Brussels, the MEPs said. A TikTok spokesperson said there are no platform rules against “sharing the name ‘Epstein’ in direct messages,” and that an issue experienced by some users was a technical problem “with one of our safety systems incorrectly responding in some instances.” TikTok is already under investigation for breaching its obligations around systemic risks under the Digital Services Act. The 32 signatories are primarily MEPs from the Greens, but also from The Left and the Socialists & Democrats. The platform struck a deal in late January with a group of investors including Oracle and Abu Dhabi’s MGX, ending a yearslong saga over the ownership of its United States operations.

The UK has historically been a global leader in life sciences innovation, but recent statistics paint a worrying picture for medicines access. The right policy can start to reverse this. We are living in a time where the intersection between breakthrough science, technology and data insights has the potential to transform treatment options for some of the toughest health conditions faced by patients in the UK. The UK has long played a central role in driving innovation when it comes to healthcare, and at Johnson & Johnson (J&J) we were pleased to see some positive signs from the Government at the end of 2025, illustrating an intent to reverse a decade of decline of investment in how the UK values innovative treatments. It was a positive first step, but now the real work begins to enable us to deliver the best possible outcomes for UK patients. To achieve this, our focus must be on ensuring our health system is set up to match the pace and gain the benefits of innovation that science provides. We need a supportive medicines environment that fully fosters growth, because even the most pioneering drugs and therapies are only valuable if they can be accessed by patients when they need them most. > even the most pioneering drugs and therapies are only valuable if they can be > accessed by patients when they need them most. At J&J, we are proud to have been part of the UK’s health innovation story for more than a century. We believe that turning ambition into delivery requires a clearer focus on the foundations that enable innovation to reach patients. We have had a substantial and long-term economic presence, with our expertise serving as the grounds for successful partnerships with patients, healthcare providers, clinical researchers and the NHS. Recent national developments are a step in the right direction The UK Government’s recent announcements on the life sciences industry are an important move to help address concerns around medicines access, innovation and the UK’s international standing. This includes a welcome planned increase to the baseline cost-effectiveness threshold (the first change to be made since its introduction in the early 2000s). While it is crucial to get this implemented properly, this seems like a step in the right direction — providing a starting point towards meaningful policy reform, industry partnership and progress for patients. The true impact of stifling medicine innovation in the UK compared with our peers These positive developments come at a critical time, but they do not fix everything. Over the past decade, spending on branded medicines has fallen in real terms, even as the NHS budget has grown by a third.[i] Years of cost-containment have left the UK health system ill-prepared for the health challenges of today, with short-term savings creating long-term consequences. Right now, access to innovative medicines in the UK lags behind almost every major European country[ii]; the UK ranks 16th and 18th among 19 comparable countries for preventable and treatable causes of mortality.[iii]These are conditions for which effective medicines already exist. Even when new medicines are approved, access is often restricted. One year after launch, usage of innovative treatments in England is just over half the average of comparator countries such as France, Germany and Spain.[iv] The effect is that people living with cancer, autoimmune conditions and rare diseases wait longer to access therapies that are already transforming lives elsewhere in Europe. And even at its new level, the UK’s Voluntary Scheme for Branded Medicines Pricing, Access and Growth (VPAG) clawback rate remains higher than in comparable countries.[v] J&J is committed to working together to develop a new pricing and access framework that is stable, predictable and internationally competitive — enabling the UK to regain its position as a leading destination for life sciences. Seeing the value of health and medicines investment as a catalyst for prosperity and growth Timely access to the right treatment achieves two things; it keeps people healthy and prevents disease worsening so they can participate in society and a thriving economy. New research from the WifOR Institute, funded by J&J, shows that countries that allocate more resources to health — especially when combined with a skilled workforce and strong infrastructure — consistently achieve better outcomes.[vi] > Timely access to the right treatment achieves two things; it keeps people > healthy and prevents disease worsening so they can participate in society and > a thriving economy. The UK Government’s recent recognition of the need for long-term change, setting out plans to increase investment in new medicines from 0.3 percent of GDP to 0.6 percent over the next 10 years is positive. It signals a move towards seeing health as one of our smartest long-term investments, underpinning the UK’s international competitiveness by beginning to bring us nearer to the levels in other major European countries. This mindset shift is critical to getting medicines to patients, and the life sciences ecosystem, including the pharmaceutical sector as a cornerstone, plays a pivotal role. It operates as a virtuous cycle — driven by the generation, production, investment in, access to and uptake of innovation. Exciting scientific developments and evolving treatment pathways mean that we have an opportunity to review the structures around medicines reimbursement to ensure they remain sustainable, competitive and responsive. At J&J, we have the knowledge and heritage to work hand-in-hand with the Government and all partners to achieve this. Together, we can realise the potential of medicine innovation in the UK Patients have the right to expect that science and innovation will reach them when they need it. Innovative treatments can be transformative for patients, meaning an improved quality of life or more precious time with loved ones. We fully support the Government’s ambitions for life sciences and the health of the nation. Now is the moment to deliver meaningful change — the NHS, Government and all system partners, including J&J, must look at what valuing innovation actually means when it comes to modernising the frameworks and mechanisms that support access and uptake. Practical ways to do this include: * Establishing a new pricing and access framework that is stable, predictable and internationally competitive. * Evolving medicines appraisal methods and processes, to deliver on the commitments of the UK-US Economic Prosperity Deal. * Adapting thresholds and value frameworks to ensure they are fit for the future — in the context of wider system pressures, including inflation, and the evolution of medical innovation requiring new approaches to assessment and access. > the NHS, Government and all system partners, including J&J, must look at what > valuing innovation actually means when it comes to modernising the frameworks > and mechanisms that support access and uptake. By truly recognising the value of health as an investment, rather than as a cost, we can return the UK to a more competitive position. The direction of travel is positive. At J&J, we stand ready to work in partnership to help ensure the UK is once again the best place in the world to research, develop and access medicines. Follow Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine UK on LinkedIn for updates on our business, our people and our community. CP-562703 | January 2026 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [i] House of Commons Library (2026). ‘NHS Funding and Expenditure’ Research Briefing. Available at: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn00724/ (Accessed January 2026). [ii] IQVIA & EFPIA (2025). EFPIA Patients W.A.I.T Indicator 2024 Survey. Available at: https://efpia.eu/media/oeganukm/efpia-patients-wait-indicator-2024-final-110425.pdf. (Accessed January 2026) [iii] The Kings Fund (2022). ‘How does the NHS compare to the health care systems of other countries?’ Available at: https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/reports/nhs-compare-health-care-systems-other-countries (Accessed January 2026) [iv] Office for Life Sciences (2024). Life sciences competitiveness indicators 2024: summary. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/life-sciences-sector-data-2024/life-sciences-competitiveness-indicators-2024-summary (Accessed January 2026). [v] ABPI. VPAG payment rate for newer medicines will be 14.5% in 2026. December 2025. Available at: https://www.abpi.org.uk/media/news/2025/december/vpag-payment-rate-for-newer-medicines-will-be-145-in-2026/. (Accessed January 2026). [vi] WifOR Institute (2025). Healthy Returns: A Catalyst for Economic Growth and Resilience. Available at: https://www.wifor.com/en/download/healthy-returns-a-catalyst-for-economic-growth-and-resilience/?wpdmdl=360794&refresh=6942abe7a7f511765977063. (Accessed January 2026).

LONDON — The U.K.’s data protection watchdog has opened a formal investigation into Elon Musk’s companies X and xAI, over the use of personal data by the Grok AI system to generate a flood of sexualized deepfakes. In a statement on Tuesday, the Information Commissioner’s Office said the “reported creation and circulation of such content raises serious concerns under U.K. data protection law and presents a risk of significant potential harm to the public.” “These concerns relate to whether personal data has been processed lawfully, fairly and transparently, and whether appropriate safeguards were built into Grok’s design and deployment to prevent the generation of harmful manipulated images using personal data,” it said. The formal investigation follows an announcement last month that the ICO was seeking urgent information from X and xAI, amid widespread reports that Grok had been used to generate sexualized images of children and adults. William Malcolm, executive director for regulatory risk and innovation at the ICO, said the reports about Grok “raise deeply troubling questions about how people’s personal data has been used.” “Losing control of personal data in this way can cause immediate and significant harm. This is particularly the case where children are involved,” Malcolm said. “Where we find obligations have not been met, we will take action to protect the public.” While the ICO’s investigation will focus on X and xAI’s compliance with U.K. data protection law, Malcolm said it would work closely with other regulators in the U.K. and abroad that are also investigating the issue. Ofcom, the U.K.’s communications regulator, opened a formal investigation into X last month under the Online Safety Act. That investigation is ongoing, Ofcom said on Tuesday. It is progressing “as a matter of urgency” but could take “months,” Ofcom added, noting that it must follow a “fair process” and “it would not be appropriate to provide a running commentary.” Ofcom also said it is not currently investigating xAI, which provides the standalone Grok AI tool, noting that “it can only take action on online harms covered by the [OSA].” The act does not apply to AI tools which do not involve searching the internet, interacting with other social media users, or generating pornography, it said. The U.K.’s Technology Secretary Liz Kendall has previously said she is assessing options to address “gaps” in the OSA. The European Commission announced its own probe into X last month, while French authorities searched X’s offices in Paris on Tuesday as part of their own criminal investigation into Grok, POLITICO reported. X did not immediately respond when contacted for comment.