This piece is interesting for managers because it reframes sovereignty as a company-level operating challenge rather than a geopolitical abstraction. Instead of blacklisting vendors, a reactive and politically driven mistake, organizations must consider which services are critical and how to maintain them. Geopolitics has entered the boardroom, and the technical scope now explicitly encompasses cloud (…)
The Center for Digital Trust (C4DT) hosted the hands‑on workshop “LLM Benchmarking” on May 19th 2026. Thirteen attendees from a wide range of our partners, ELCA, Kudelski, SICPA and Swisscom, gathered to learn how to use benchmarks to choose the best LLM model for their use cases. The day‑long event started off with a lecture on (…)
To promote research and education in cyber-defence, the EPFL and the Cyber-Defence Campus have jointly launched the “CYD Fellowships – A Talent Program for Cyber-Defence Research. ”The 14th call for applications is now open with a deadline of 19 August 2026 for Doctoral and Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship applications.
A slightly morbid example of how you never know what your data might eventually be used for. Although this is not exactly a classical case of your privacy being violated, I have some doubts that everyone who enthusiastically chased cute virtual monsters in their neighborhood would also have volunteered to collect data to train military (…)
We use Matrix, too, so this issue hits close to home for us. The timing is infortunate. Europe is actively working to reduce its digital dependency, and this incident has landed right in the middle of those efforts, ready to be weaponized by skeptics. However, the details matter. From what is currently known, neither the (…)
Amongst all the big news, I really like blog posts like this – just a cryptographer finding an interesting oddity, deciding to dig into it, and sharing their findings with the rest of us, even if nothing big came of it.
A reality check for anyone assuming AI subscriptions will stay at today’s prices — or get cheaper. Repricing is only a matter of time. But beyond the economics lies a sovereignty trap: cheap access accelerates dependency, erodes internal capability, and eliminates negotiating leverage before the real cost arrives. By then, workflows and data are already (…)
I find this interesting because it extends the debate about digital sovereignty beyond software and hardware to the scarce resource of satellite communication spectrum. The EU’s 20-year strategy clearly demonstrates its vision for autonomous, secure infrastructure, such as the IRIS² project. I hope this assertive yet justified strategy progresses without provoking retaliation from the US (…)
This piece offers an optimistic path forward for AI governance. Rather than searching for consensus on abstract ethical principles, we can build on the public values that our societies have already agreed upon. The author also makes the important point that experimentation in AI governance will inevitably produce failures and that this is not only (…)
As the global AI landscape consolidates around US and Chinese dominance, every nation outside this duopoly faces an urgent question: how can countries retain meaningful control over a technology increasingly expected to shape their economic competitiveness, national security, and societal resilience? From the viability of sovereign cloud architectures and open-weight foundation models to the governance mechanisms needed to ensure AI systems reflect Swiss values and legal frameworks, this conference brings together industry leaders, researchers, legal experts, policymakers, and civil society actors to assess the concrete levers of AI sovereignty and work toward actionable recommendations for a Swiss sovereign AI strategy.
Now even the pope chimes in on giving his ideas how to use LLMs in a responsible way. His name predecessor, Leo the XIII, had many things to say about responsible capitalism. Now is the time to set the agenda straight with regards to LLMs: the pope puts the human in the center again, asks (…)
It’s encouraging to see digital sovereignty discussions beginning to bear fruit, though much of that fruit is still unripe. The more closely the non-US community examines the issue, the more complex it becomes: ‘sovereign’ cloud computing means little if the underlying hardware is produced in the US or China. A server is not just one (…)
November 10th, 2026, 09h30-18h00, Starling Hotel, 1025 Saint-Sulpice This event is an official Road to Geneva event, approved as part of the Geneva AI Summit 2027 pre-event programme. The Geneva AI Summit will take place on 21–22 June 2027 at Palexpo, Geneva. Follow the conversation using #GenevaAISummit and #RoadtoGeneva. In brief: Global AI capability is (…)
The Geneva Dialogue on Responsible Behaviour in Cyberspace is bringing together key stakeholders during Geneva Cyber Week to explore how AI is transforming cyber threats and whether existing cyber norms can keep up with rapidly evolving technology — particularly when the same tools can be used for both attack and defence.
Talkspace has been using patients’ therapy session data to train an AI chatbot, and undoubtedly, many of them have no idea. It is well documented that most users do not read terms of service closely enough to understand what they’re actually consenting to. Even if they did, Talkspace’s assurances that the data is “anonymized” are (…)
I think this take on the state of AI adoption is spot on. Since ChatGPT made its public debut, we’ve been promised large-scale transformation of the workplace and society at large. But a little over three years in, apart from very specific tasks, we’re still unclear what this supposed revolution will actually look like, and (…)
This philosophical rumination on whether or not LLMs have a consciousness has actual implications on how to train LLMs and how users will interact with them. It is possible to train LLMs as pure technology and remove any reference to a consciousness, but then alignement becomes very difficult, as there is no basis to anchor (…)
Following a competitive recommendation and peer-review process, EPFL professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering David Atienza has been elected to the prestigious Pan-European Academy of Humanities Letters and Sciences.
Since Anthropic announced that it’ll not publicly release its newest Claude Mythos model because of concerns around its capabilities in exploiting software vulnerabilities, I have been searching for a good analysis of this non-release. I wondered whether this was truly responsible disclosure or nothing but a marketing stunt. Bruce Schneier’s take on it finally answered (…)
We’re used to the terms “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles” when discussing the dangers of social networks, search engines, and personalized ads. Now, with AI chatbots, a new term joins the ranks: “sycophancy”, or telling people what they want to hear. Could sycophantic chatbots be more harmful than social media echo chambers? My gut says (…)
Le dernier rapport de l’Office fédéral de la cybersécurité indique une personnalisation et une sophistication des cyberattaques visant les entreprises et les particuliers en Suisse. Quelles sont les menaces les plus dangereuses qui ciblent l’économie? Comment les prévenir? Et comment bien former son personnel face à ces attaques? Giuseppe Bianco, Head Cash Management chez UBS et Olivier Crochat, directeur exécutif du Center for Digital Trust (C4DT) de l’EPFL en débattront avec Anouch Seydtaghia du journal Le Temps.
In “On Privacy and Technology”, Prof. Solove distils years of rigorous academic research into an accessible analysis that cuts through the noise surrounding privacy debates with surgical precision. What makes this work particularly compelling is Solove’s unflinching exposure of uncomfortable truths: the consent model is fundamentally flawed, self-regulation has failed and cannot succeed, and current (…)
From Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), to Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) – also sometimes called Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), it’s interesting to notice how much we rely on specific tools to “see the world”. With search engines, we had to scroll down the results and decide ourselves which links were relevant (and still feared how much (…)
Finally, the term I’ve been looking for! Technology paternalism: when technical systems shape, restrict, or pre-decide our choices before we can make them. What strikes me most about this concept is how it finds echoes in so many current political debates—collective goals (safety, security, efficiency) versus individual choice; autonomy versus dependency; who holds power and (…)
