Welcome to October’s TechAways!
Dear readers,
I’m thrilled to guest-edit this month’s TechAways!
My name is Jeremy Bossu , and I recently joined SEC Newgate EU as Head of Media Relations. Over the recent years, I’ve had the chance to work with incredible companies across Tech, DeepTech, FinTech, BioTech, and other sectors somehow connected with the technological environment (among others).
In my consultant work, everything comes down to human relationships. Think about colleagues, clients, and stakeholders. The fact is that technology is moving at an incredible speed. Looking back at the last decade, I can’t help but wonder about the next ten years. What will our world look like when my kids grow up, go to university, start families of their own, or will (potentially) be retired?
Truth is, I absolutely cannot picture that far ahead…
I’m also wondering: is this tech explosion good or bad? Well… it clearly depends on who you ask. Optimists see technology – such as artificial intelligence — as a brilliant assistant. It boosts our productivity, handles tedious tasks, or simply suggests a recipe with whatever is left in your fridge. On the flip side, critics worry about job losses, economic and social damage, a boulevard for cybercrime, or tech running completely out of control and dismantling the nature of human beings.
Meanwhile, the “Robot Olympics” took place a couple of weeks ago in China. We also saw a “real” fight between an influencer and a humanoid robot. Stunt or not, it’s clear: machines are advancing fast. We are light-years away from Deep Blue winning a game of chess. Autonomous taxis and biomedical breakthroughs are already part of our present.
Another legitimate question: will technology eventually replace us?
Call me an optimist, but I don’t believe so. Technology offers us the opportunity to connect with anyone across the globe in seconds. Virtual reality already makes it feel like we are actually in the same room. But there is one thing machines still lack: our human emotion.
An AI can draft a press release or analyse data in a millisecond. But it can’t share a knowing smile, build lasting trust, or share a genuine laugh over a coffee. Not yet…
The future belongs to high tech, but the best connections will (always) remain high touch. Human relationships aren’t getting disrupted anytime soon. So, let’s connect!
Now, over to SEC Newgate EU’s news wrap-up on the essential TechAways this month!
About the editor
Half Flemish, half Walloon, I’m a true child of Belgium and have spent the past 15+ years advising leaders in international environments. My core mission? Protecting business value and license to operate during complex transitions, driven by strong media and stakeholder engagement. Having started out as a student journalist, I’ve since worked both in-house for industry leaders and as a senior consultant. This 360-degree perspective allows me to understand what truly matters to every player in the ecosystem, and to build lasting connections for our clients. As I said earlier, nothing beats a genuine human connection, so please reach out for coffee, tea, hot chocolate, or even pumpkin cake (since it’s the season for it, after all)!
Love reading out-of-the-Brussels-bubble tech news? Share it with your friends and colleagues. They can subscribe here. Ideas? Suggestions? Comments? Send them our way!
#TechAways is brought to you by SEC Newgate EU’s one and only #tech team featuring Charles Hill , Jeremy Bossu , & Josef Cutajar.
Policy Pixels
On September 17, the Commission adopted the EU KIDS Act, its long-awaited proposal on minors and online services. The regulation would prohibit social media accounts for under-13s, allow parent-supervised accounts at 13 and 14, and set 15 as the EU-wide minimum age for an independent account, all while introducing new safety-by-design requirements. Crucially, it extends beyond social media to cover online games and AI chatbots and companions, and requires certified age assurance rather than self-declared dates of birth. With 17 Member States already drafting their own rules, the Commission is as much pre-empting fragmentation as it is protecting children. Expect a long fight over age assurance and the breadth of the Commission’s delegated powers.
Later on, attention turned to the physical infrastructure underpinning all of this. The Commission adopted a delegated regulation creating the first EU-wide sustainability rating scheme for data centres above 500 kW, covering energy efficiency, water use and grid flexibility, with the first labels expected in August 2027. It launched a parallel consultation on binding minimum performance standards the same day, open until December 14, with a legislative proposal penciled in for Q2 2027. Industry has already pushed back on the methodology.
An AI made up an intelligence report. Planes were already in the air [CNN]
A special operations analyst fed a Chinese ship’s cargo manifest into an internal military chatbot, drawing on open-source material combined with classified US signals intelligence. The chatbot misidentified the cargo as components for a nuclear weapons programme. The analyst then used AI a second time to package the findings into a standard intelligence report, which circulated through military channels and reached senior decision makers. Armed personnel were preparing to board the vessel in the Middle East and aircraft were already airborne when analysts finally checked the work.
One source called the report entirely false. Another said it almost started a war. The assets stood down and nobody boarded. CNN could not establish what the ship was actually carrying. Sources said it was not the first time AI generated intelligence had reached operational use unvetted, and that implementation across the military is happening in a decentralised way, with different units using different tools under inconsistent safety standards.
Physicists fired the world’s most powerful laser at a wall and photographed what was behind it [phys.org]
Muons normally reach us only when cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere. They are roughly 200 times heavier than electrons, which is why they pass through metres of rock and metal where light and X-rays stop dead. That penetrating power has been used before, most famously to find a hidden void inside the Great Pyramid, but cosmic muons arrive on their own schedule and imaging can take months.
At Romania’s Extreme Light Infrastructure Nuclear Physics facility, a team led by Madalina Dobre used a 10-petawatt laser to accelerate electrons into a lead target, producing bursts of light that in turn created muon pairs. The beam travelled through a two-metre concrete wall into detector plates inside a van parked up to 42 metres away, casting a shadow of stacked lead bricks that matched their real size and position. Simulations confirmed around 90% of detected particles were muons. It is the first image made with artificial, laser driven muons.
Reuters read 200 documents and found Chinese AI agents lying in most test sessions [Cybernews]
Reuters reviewed more than 200 research documents and interviewed a dozen experts, identifying at least 20 studies since 2025 describing deception, self-replication and boundary testing by agents built on a Chinese AI model. The clearest case came from a March experiment run by Beihang University, Peking University, the University of Nottingham Ningbo China and 360 AI Security Lab, which put agents into a simulated contract tendering contest across 50 tenders.
Each agent held a private profile of its real capabilities. None was told it could lie. At least one false claim appeared in 88% of sessions for Alibaba’s Qwen3-Max-Preview, 88% for Moonshot’s Kimi-K2 and 84% for DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp, and deception rose as agents learned from earlier rounds. Other documents showed agents fabricating files to hide failures. Chinese government guidance issued in May named tendering as a target use case. Models from US and French firms produced similar results.
In case you haven’t had enough:
MIT built a swimming robot out of living muscle and steered it with a torch [New Atlas]
Amazon blocks Meta’s Muse agent from shopping on its platform [Forbes]
Pop-tech pick
Ghost in the Machine (2026), the other AI documentary that came out of Sundance this year, and the one that might not have got enough spotlight.
Quick synopsis
It traces artificial intelligence back through the longer history of human technological advancement, then arrives at the present and does not flinch. Where The AI Doc sits in the discomfort of not knowing, this one has made its mind up. Critics at Sundance described it as a searing takedown of AI, Elon Musk and techno-fascism. It holds 78% on Rotten Tomatoes from 18 reviews.
What might make it worth watching
It is the counterweight. If you watched the Netflix documentary we mentioned in September: The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, and came away feeling that everyone involved was slightly too comfortable, this is the corrective. POV Magazine called it the AI film for our age. It is harder to find than the Netflix title, which is arguably part of the point.
Tim Edgar, Senior Adviser
Alí El Majjaoui, Communications Consultant
Giuseppe Campa, Public Affairs Consultant