Fortune The big picture

Henna Virkkunen at the headquarters of the European Commission in Brussels on Jan. 15, 2025. (Photo: Martin Bertrand/Hans Lucas/AFP/Getty Images)

With the Trump administration applying heavy pressure on Europe over its digital rules, lawmakers there are worried that the EU might be preparing to water down the implementation of its shiny new AI Act.

In a letter sent to European Commission VP Henna Virkkunen on Tuesday—and published for the first time by Fortune—former AI Act negotiators said the draft code of practice for following the law misrepresented what the law actually said.

Specifically, this version of the code would allow AI providers who “adopt more extreme political positions” (who could that possibly be a reference to?) to roll out election-warping misinformation or enable wide-scale discrimination, among other sins.

“It is dangerous, undemocratic and creates legal uncertainty to fully reinterpret and narrow down a legal text that co-legislators agreed on, through a Code of Practice,” they wrote.

“I think there is pressure coming from the United States, but it would be very naïve [to think] that we can make the Trump administration happy by going in this direction, because it would never be enough,” said top signatory Brando Benifei, who was one of the European Parliament’s lead negotiators on the bill, and who by remarkable coincidence now chairs its delegation for relations with the U.S.

Benifei said he and other former AI Act negotiators had met with the Commission’s AI Office experts, who are writing the drafts of the code, on Tuesday. On the basis of that meeting, he expressed optimism that the offending changes could be rolled back before the code is finalized. Let’s see about that. —David Meyer

Apple has reportedly named a global head of stores: Vanessa Trigub.

Trigub, who started as an Apple intern in the aughts, previously oversaw stores in the company’s Americas West region. She will now oversee the rest—Europe and the Middle East; Asia Pacific; and Americas East—and regional chiefs will report to her, according to Bloomberg.

Apple’s retail organization is ultimately led by SVP Deirdre O’Brien, who succeeded former Burberry Group CEO Angela Ahrendts in the role six years ago. O’Brien also runs the company’s human resources group. 

The new changes are intended to “streamline” and “simplify” the retail unit, according to the report, limiting O’Brien’s direct reports to Trigub and the VPs who run retail marketing, online sales, and real estate.

But simpler doesn’t mean smaller. Apple’s retail network totals 535 stores worldwide.

The report notes that Apple “has increasingly discussed succession plans internally” as its top executives approach the theoretical retirement age; O’Brien, for one, has been at the company since 1988. But she’s neither the oldest executive on Apple’s leadership team nor the only one who worked there in the 1980s. —AN

As the open source debate rages on in the AI world, Google has reportedly decided to develop its Android mobile operating system “fully in private,” according to a new report.

That doesn’t mean that Android won’t be open source. Google told Android Authority that it’s committed to publishing the software’s source code after each release. 

For a decade and a half, Google has developed Android via two branches: an internal development branch, and an “Android Open Source Project” branch that accepts code contributions from third-party developers (pending Google approval). 

Some components (e.g. core framework) of the software emerge from the private branch; others (e.g. Bluetooth) come from the public one. 

But in recent years the public branch has consistently lagged behind the private one, and the discrepancies between them have taken time and attention for Google to reconcile and ultimately release.

Moving forward, everything will be developed privately. It’s a notable change for platform (not app) developers, but it will have limited effect on end users, who may only see a difference in the form of a suspicious lack of news stories about code changes that unintentionally reveal Google’s future development plans. Oops.  —AN