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Washington cut off AI access three times in two years, most recently against its own flagship lab. The first AltLibre Paper documents the record, and what Europe has built to answer it. Your data. Your rules. Your continent. www.linkedin.com/newsletters/...

A DCMS review of open-source AI security landed this week. One number stands out: of the 10,000 most downloaded open-licence models on Hugging Face, fifteen carry any security documentation. Under 0.2%. Regulated sectors are adopting these blind. The proposed fix is an AI bill of materials.

Nominations are open for the eleventh Cornwall Apprenticeship Awards. A new Small Employer of the Year category, for firms with fewer than 50 staff, joins the employer line-up this year. Truro and Penwith College presents the ceremony at the Eden Project in February. Worth a look.

Europe is tendering AI gigafactories. The credibility test is plainer than the headlines: can an organisation buy the capability it needs, under law it answers to, on terms it can exit, at a price that does not punish the choice? Inference capacity not written into the contract does not exist.

Liskeard's ZLC Energy will strip gas heating from Penryn Campus sports centre. A 120kWth Mitsubishi Electric air source system replaces the old boilers, the next step in a six year decarbonisation partnership with FX Plus. Sports centres are a hard test for heat pumps. One to watch.

Brussels has opened a €96 million cyber call, and its shape is telling. The money goes to deployment, not policy: AI defence tools for SMEs, compliance capacity for NIS2 and the CRA, preparedness testing, cable hubs for every sea basin. Europe is moving from writing rules to making them work.

United Downs in Cornwall is now producing technical grade lithium carbonate at over 99.3% purity, from the same geothermal brine that drives its power plant. Battery makers can use it with no further refining. A European first at commercial scale. Geothermal keeps surprising me.

Nothing better than a visit to @nationaltrust.org.uk Cotehele in Cornwall

Cornwall Council has launched its first international strategy, pitching the county as the UK's "Fifth Nation" for investment in geothermal, lithium and space tech. A place usually spoken for by Westminster is drafting its own pitch to the world. Follow-through will be the real test.

Lang Llewellyn opens a second office in St Austell today, built on the acquisition of RPM Lettings earlier this year, not a cold start. The launch doubles as an open house, landlords and tenants invited to meet the people behind the business. Growth by acquisition usually skips the introductions.

Year 10s in Cornwall can programme a Mars rover for work experience this year. Remote first round, GitHub submissions, sixty in-person places next July. Applications open 3 September. Point a teenager at it.

Falmouth Harbour now sells HVO, a renewable diesel cutting marine emissions by up to 90 per cent, one of the first UK coastal harbours to do so. It tested the fuel a year on its own pilot boat before committing £50,000 to the facility. Proof before rollout, not the other way round.

The Dutch Senate passed its NIS2 law on 7 July, the day before the European Commission referred the Netherlands to the CJEU for missing the original transposition deadline. Brussels does not plan irony, but this is irony all the same. A day earlier would have avoided the referral entirely.

Cornish Lithium has been awarded £7.2 million from the government's DRIVE35 programme, matched pound for pound by the company, to fund production wells and an extraction plant at Cross Lanes. The pitch used to be geology. Now it is supply chain security, and Cornwall has both.

Solve, the Cornish digital agency, has filled three of its four new leadership roles from within. The fourth relocated from London to take it. Most agencies chase talent outward. This one grew its own, then persuaded someone to move here for the rest.

Chinese state actors used Anthropic's Claude to run a cyber attack that was 80 to 90 percent autonomous, per Carnegie Europe's July research. The EU AI Act certifies systems before deployment. Certification ends at the door; the real risk starts once the agent is live.

Cornwall Space Cluster has launched a £15,000 PR fund for members who cannot justify an in house comms team. Cluster lead Nathan Coe puts it plainly: too many Cornish space businesses go unrecognised simply because PR feels out of reach. A visibility gap is still a market failure.

Cornwall Council and the Brittany region signed a memorandum in July, covering marine energy, cyber security, culture and citizen exchange. Cross Channel cooperation on cyber security is not the story people expect from Cornwall. It is exactly the story Cornwall should be telling.

New on AltLibre: America has cut AI access three times in two years, including to its own frontier lab. China never cuts access, it embeds the same control into law instead. Neither is safe by default. The real question is which risk you can actually audit.

A social media agency in Penryn made two national shortlists at this year's SocialDay Awards, one for client work and one for founder Katherine George training the wider industry. Cornwall's digital sector rarely gets national attention for anything but the view. This is the better kind.

Cornwall Council has launched its first international strategy, pitching geothermal, lithium and space technology to global investors. The resources were always there. What's new is someone finally writing the pitch deck.

Devolving budgets without devolving the data underneath them leaves local leaders accountable for outcomes they can only partly see. Whoever holds the data tends to hold the initiative. That's as true for a county as for a continent.

Parts of the Cornish valleys are temperate rainforest, rarer globally than the tropical kind. Mossy, dripping, ancient oak woods a few miles from the beaches everyone photographs. The county keeps its best secrets in plain sight.

Keep one way into your own systems that depends on no cloud at all. Local accounts, sealed credentials, tested now and then. The day your identity provider is unreachable should be a bad day, not the end of the story.

£36 million is building full-fibre to some of Cornwall's hardest-to-reach communities. Rural connectivity is quietly one of the county's better stories: the last place wired is rarely the last place with ideas.

An EU region in an American cloud changes the geography, not the jurisdiction. The operator is the operator, and the law follows the operator. Residency is what the brochure sells. Sovereignty is what the courtroom tests.

Cornwall has lithium in its granite and geothermal heat in the same boreholes. The county that powered the first industrial revolution holding minerals for the electric one is either poetry or geology. Possibly both.

Cornwall has the only working primary tin producer in Europe waking up at South Crofty. Tin is in every circuit board on your desk. Strategic minerals policy usually means maps of other continents; occasionally it means Camborne.

Ask a team how often their reviewers actually overturn the AI's output. Perhaps zero disagreement is success. Mostly it means nobody is checking any more.

The Celtic Sea floating wind projects will put gigawatts of generation off the Cornish coast, run by control systems that are critical national infrastructure the moment they switch on. The turbines get photographed. The OT security should get the budget.

Nobody signs a dependency into existence. Every workflow wired into one AI stack, every team trained on one ecosystem, is a footprint in wet cement. No single step commits anyone to anything. The cement still sets.

Goonhilly in Cornwall carries deep-space communications for missions most people assume run through California. Sixty years after it relayed the first live transatlantic TV, the big dishes on the Lizard are still working. Quietly, as Cornwall tends to.

A model you can download, self-host and fine-tune cannot be switched off, repriced or subpoenaed at source. Open weights are the sovereignty feature nobody puts on a slide.

Around 95% of the world's international data travels through subsea cables, and a good share of Europe's lands on a beach near Bude. Cornwall looks like the edge of the map. For the internet, it is one of the front doors.

Europe legislated a Digital Identity Wallet for every citizen by December. Workforce identity, the layer guarding the actual data, stays rented from two American companies. We built the passport office and still rent the office keys.

The gap between what your AI can reach and what the permissions diagram says it can reach: nobody budgets for closing it because nobody has measured it. Two different documents. Only one of them is true.

Every time a UK firm ships its data to a US cloud, it exports control. The CLOUD Act does not pause at the border. European infrastructure exists. We simply refuse to pay the switching cost. Your data deserves a postcode it can answer to!

What a great idea!