This month, the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, convened government representatives, AI companies and experts at Bletchley Park – the historic home of Allied code-breaking during the second world war – to discuss how the much-hyped technology can be deployed safely. The summit has been rightly criticised on a number of grounds, including prioritising input from big tech over civil society voices, and fixating on far-fetched existential risks over tangible everyday harms. But the summit's biggest failure – itself a direct result of those biases – was that it had nothing meaningful to say about reining in the dominant corporations that pose the biggest threat to our safety. The summit's key "achievements" consisted of a vague joint communique warning of the risks from so-called frontier AI models and calling for "inclusive global dialogue" plus an (entirely voluntary) agreement between governments and large AI companies on safety testing. Yet neither of these measures have any real teeth, and what's worse, they give powerful corporations a privileged seat at the table when it comes to shaping the debate on AI regulation.

The tide is seemingly turning against Meta, Google and other tech giants. Groundbreaking new European Union legislation is imminent, aimed at forcing the large digital platforms to do more to keep users safe and cutting down market abuses, data capture and surveillance infrastructure. As the Digital Services Act package was being finalised, the very public crossing of swords between Elon Musk and the European Commission over Twitter captured headlines. Yet the Musk spectacle was a sideshow. Much more urgently in need of scrutiny is big tech's hidden lobbying against the DSA. It is unlikely that Brussels has previously seen campaigns on such a scale and practices so out of line with the requirements of a democratic, open society.