Fable 5 Export Ban: Cybersecurity Leaders Push Back

Samantha: Welcome to The State of Tech, The European Edition, Thursday June eighteenth, 2026. I'm Samantha Lawrence.

Bob: And I'm Bob Russell. Today: AI bots have officially overtaken humans on the open web, a high-profile open letter pushing Washington to lift the export ban on Anthropic's Fable 5 model, China sets the table for a global AI governance summit in Shanghai, Nokia bets big on US chip packaging to wire up the AI boom, and to close out, two things you can actually try yourself: the AnyType notes app, and the Flighty travel companion. Let's get into it.

AI bots now generate more web traffic than humans, Cloudflare data shows.

Samantha: We start with a number that genuinely reshapes how we should think about the internet. Cloudflare, the company that handles a huge chunk of global web traffic, is reporting that automated AI bots now account for fifty-seven point four percent of all web requests worldwide. That's a majority. For the first time, the open web is being browsed more by machines than by people, and it happened faster than almost anyone predicted.

Bob: And Microsoft's data points the same way. The company says automated and AI-driven traffic is now running at roughly eight times the volume of human traffic across its services, and it tripled its own AI-driven sessions over the course of 2025. So this isn't just a Cloudflare blip. The crawlers, the agent assistants doing tasks on your behalf, the AI shopping bots, the research agents, all of it is piling up. The web is being read, summarised, and acted on by software, and humans are increasingly the minority audience.

Samantha: For European publishers, retailers, and brands this is a real strategic shift. If most of your visitors are AI agents fetching information for someone else, then traditional digital marketing, the banner ads, the cookie banners, the carefully tuned landing pages, lose a lot of their purpose. What matters instead is whether your content is readable and trustworthy to an AI that's compiling an answer for a human user. That's a different game, with different winners.

Bob: There's also a harder edge here. More bot traffic means more bandwidth costs, more scraping disputes, and more pressure on European regulators around copyright and data use. The European Commission has already flagged AI scraping as an open question under the AI Act and the Copyright Directive. Expect that debate to intensify, because publishers can now point at concrete numbers and say: the machines are taking more than they're giving back. And smaller European sites, in particular, will feel the infrastructure bill before they feel any AI-driven revenue.

Top cybersecurity leaders urge Washington to reverse the Anthropic Fable 5 export ban.

Samantha: Over to a story that's putting real pressure on the US administration. More than a hundred senior cybersecurity executives and researchers have signed an open letter calling on Washington to scrap the export ban on Anthropic's Fable 5 language model. The signatories include security leaders tied to Adobe, Zoom, Sophos, Vercel, Veracode, Nvidia, and Stanford's Human-Centered AI institute. Their argument is blunt: the ban ties defenders' hands without slowing attackers down, because the same capabilities already exist in rival models.

Bob: The flashpoint is a so-called jailbreak that US authorities cited when they imposed the restrictions. Former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos says that specific jailbreak actually produced a proof-of-concept that defensive security teams are using to patch vulnerabilities. In other words, the very capability the government flagged as too dangerous to export is, according to these researchers, helping the good guys close holes faster. The letter asks for AI model regulation grounded in scientific evaluation, a democratic process, and transparent, even-handed enforcement.

Samantha: For Europe this matters in two ways. First, European cybersecurity teams at banks, telecoms, and critical infrastructure operators rely on access to frontier models for red-teaming, the exercise of attacking your own systems to find weaknesses. If Fable 5 stays blocked for export, European defenders lose a tool while attackers, who don't respect export rules, keep theirs. Second, this letter is essentially a template Brussels will study closely as it works out how to implement the AI Act's rules on high-risk and general-purpose models. The fight in Washington is a preview of the fight that's coming here.

Samantha: Quick interruption. If you listen to The State of Tech regularly, hit that like button and subscribe, that way you'll never miss an episode. Okay, moving on.

China invites the world to Shanghai for a high-level AI governance meeting.

Bob: China has confirmed it will host the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, plus a high-level meeting on global AI governance, in Shanghai next month. Beijing is framing this as an opening to strengthen international cooperation on AI, leaning heavily on the language of a human-centred approach and what officials call AI for good. The pitch is that AI's risks and opportunities cross borders, so the response should too.

Samantha: The timing is pointed. We've just had the G7 leaders discussing whether to share America's most advanced AI models with trusted partners, and now China is positioning itself as the alternative convener, the place where the rest of the world, including the Global South, gets a seat at the table. For Brussels this is awkward and useful at the same time. Awkward, because European officials are wary of legitimising a governance process they don't fully control. Useful, because the EU has the world's most developed AI rulebook, and Shanghai is a stage to export those ideas.

Bob: Expect European delegations to show up, but cautiously. The real test is whether the Shanghai meeting produces anything concrete: shared definitions of risk, common reporting standards, an agreement on how to handle AI incidents that cross borders. Without that, it's another photo opportunity. With it, you get the early scaffolding of a global AI framework, with China holding the pen on the first draft. And for European companies operating in Asia, the rules that come out of this conversation will shape what they can deploy in those markets.

Nokia expands US chip packaging to wire up the AI boom, adding 250 jobs in Pennsylvania.

Samantha: Now to a story that isn't about AI models, it's about the plumbing underneath them. Nokia is significantly expanding its advanced test and packaging operations in Allentown, Pennsylvania. This is the painstaking work of taking finished chips, particularly the optical networking chips that move data between servers, and turning them into reliable components that data centres can actually use. Nokia is investing to nearly double its Pennsylvania workforce, adding more than two hundred and fifty engineering, manufacturing, and R&D jobs over three years.

Bob: The economic impact projection is over five hundred million dollars over five years, but the strategic story is the bigger one. AI data centres don't just need processors, they need huge amounts of high-speed optical connectivity to shuttle data between racks and between buildings. That's traditionally been a quiet, unglamorous corner of the industry, and now it's a bottleneck. By bringing more of that packaging work onshore in the US, Nokia is also responding to Washington's push to reduce reliance on Asian supply chains for critical components.

Samantha: For Europe this is a mixed signal. Nokia is a Finnish company, headquartered in Espoo, and yet its growth investment in this strategic area is going to Pennsylvania, not to Finland or Germany. That reflects where the demand is, the US hyperscalers building out data centres at extraordinary speed, but it also underlines a worry European industry groups have been voicing: that without a serious European industrial answer on AI infrastructure, even our home champions will keep tilting their factories westward. The European Chips Act has money behind it, but the gap with US incentives remains wide.

Bob: One more thing worth noting. Optical networking is one of the few areas where European firms, Nokia among them, still hold genuine global leadership. If that leadership is being scaled out of US factories, the question for Brussels is how to keep enough of the value chain anchored on this continent to maintain leverage. Right now, the answer is unclear.

AnyType is the free, private notes app that builds your own personal knowledge base.

Samantha: To close out, two things you can actually use today. The first one is for anyone who's ever felt their notes are scattered across five different apps. It's called AnyType. Think of it as a free personal knowledge tool, somewhere between a notes app, a database, and a personal wiki. The big selling point is that everything stays encrypted on your own devices and syncs peer-to-peer between them, so there's no company server holding your thoughts.

Bob: That privacy angle is the headline difference from the better-known competitors. Users frequently point out that AnyType works offline by default and doesn't require a subscription. You can build pages that link to each other, create simple databases for things like reading lists, project trackers, or contacts, and then pull them into different views, a calendar, a board, a gallery. Reviewers compare it favourably to the paid tools in this space, especially for people who want the same flexibility without sending their data to a cloud.

Samantha: It's available on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android, which makes it genuinely cross-platform, and the apps are open source. For European listeners worried about where their data sits under GDPR, the local-first design solves a lot of those questions before you even start. Setup takes about ten minutes: download the app, create a key phrase, and you're in. There's a learning curve if you want to build complex setups, but for plain note-taking it's usable on day one.

Bob: A practical tip from the community: start small. Use it as a daily journal for the first week, then gradually add structure. People who try to recreate their entire digital life on day one tend to bounce off. People who let it grow naturally tend to stick with it. And because it's free with no upsell pressure, there's no penalty for trying.

Flighty turns your phone into a travel command centre that knows about delays before the airline tells you.

Samantha: Second find, and this one is squarely for travellers. It's called Flighty. It's a flight tracking app that has built a strong reputation among frequent flyers, and it's especially handy as we head into the European summer travel chaos. The core trick: Flighty pulls data from aviation sources directly, so it often knows your flight is delayed, gate-changed, or cancelled before the airline app does, sometimes by an hour or more.

Bob: Travel writers and frequent flyer communities consistently rank it among the best tools in this category. You forward your booking confirmation by email and it auto-imports the trip. From then on, the app tracks the inbound aircraft, the weather at both airports, historical on-time performance for that specific route, and live taxi and runway times. If you connect it to your calendar and your lock screen, you get live updates without opening anything.

Samantha: It runs on iPhone and iPad, with an Apple Watch companion. There's a free tier that covers the basics, like a single upcoming flight at a time, and a paid tier for unlimited tracking, push alerts on delays, and the deeper data. For Europeans flying within Schengen this summer, where strikes and air traffic control disruptions are a recurring problem, the early warning on delays alone often pays for the subscription. Setup is under five minutes if you forward an email.

Bob: One caveat: it's Apple-only at the moment. Android users who want something comparable tend to land on alternatives, but for the iPhone crowd, Flighty is the one most reviewers point to. And it pairs nicely with whatever loyalty app you already use, because it focuses purely on the flight itself, not the booking or the points.

Samantha: That's our episode. Today we covered: AI bots overtaking humans on the web, cybersecurity leaders pushing back on the Fable 5 export ban, China hosting a global AI governance meeting in Shanghai, Nokia expanding chip packaging in Pennsylvania to feed the AI boom, and two things to try yourself: the AnyType notes app and the Flighty travel companion.

Bob: Want to know more or react? Visit stateoftech.eu or email us at info@doorzetters.net.

Bob: State of Tech, the tech world in 15 minutes.