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The European Commission has stalled one of its investigations into Elon Musk’s X for breaking the bloc’s digital transparency rules, while it seeks to conclude trade talks with the US.

Brussels was expected to finalise its probe into the social media platform before the EU’s summer recess but will miss this deadline, according to three officials familiar with the matter. They noted that a decision was likely to follow after clarity emerged in the EU-US trade negotiations. “It’s all tied up,” one of the officials added.

The EU has several investigations into X under the bloc’s Digital Services Act, a set of rules for large online players to police their platforms more aggressively.

The rules have become a flashpoint between Brussels and US Big Tech companies, backed by Donald Trump’s administration, which claim that the EU is unfairly targeting American firms and infringing freedom of speech principles championed by the Maga movement.

Last year, Brussels found X was in preliminary breach of its regulations for deceptive design and insufficient access to data and transparency. The bloc can impose fines up to 6 per cent of the platform’s yearly worldwide revenue, although penalties are expected to be set below that ceiling.

The commission, which runs EU trade policy, has been negotiating to secure a trade deal with the US since April, when the US president announced so-called reciprocal tariffs on the bloc, originally set at 20 per cent. They were then dropped to 10 per cent to allow time for negotiations, before Trump over the weekend declared he would levy tariffs of 30 per cent from August 1.

The ongoing talks make all US-related decisions particularly politically sensitive, Brussels officials said, as no one wants to offend Trump and escalate transatlantic trade conflicts.

While Trump and Musk have fallen out this year after developing a political alliance on the 2024 election, the US president has directly attacked EU penalties on US companies calling them a “form of taxation” and comparing fines on tech companies with “overseas extortion”.

Despite the US pressure, commission president Ursula von der Leyen has explicitly stated Brussels will not change its digital rule book. In April, the bloc imposed a total of €700mn fines on Apple and Facebook owner Meta for breaching antitrust rules.

But unlike the Apple and Meta investigations, which fall under the Digital Markets Act, there are no clear legal deadlines under the DSA. That gives the bloc more political leeway on when it announces its formal findings. The EU also has probes into Meta and TikTok under its content moderation rule book.

The commission said the “proceedings against X under the DSA are ongoing”, adding that the enforcement of “our legislation is independent of the current ongoing negotiations”.

It added that it “remains fully committed to the effective enforcement of digital legislation, including the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act”.

Anna Cavazzini, a European lawmaker for the Greens, said she expected the commission “to move on decisively with its investigation against X as soon as possible”.

“The commission must continue making changes to EU regulations an absolute red line in tariff negotiations with the US,” she added.

Alongside Brussels’ probe into X’s transparency breaches, it is also looking into content moderation at the company after Musk hosted Alice Weidel of the far-right Alternative for Germany for a conversation on the social media platform ahead of the country’s elections.

Some European lawmakers, as well as the Polish government, are also pressing the commission to open an investigation into Musk’s Grok chatbot after it spewed out antisemitic tropes last week.

X said it disagreed “with the commission’s assessment of the comprehensive work we have done to comply with the Digital Services Act and the commission’s interpretation of the Act’s scope”.

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Johnny Echols, lead guitarist for the 1960s rock band Love, is a fount of stories. In a podcast interview with superstar producer Rick Rubin a few years ago, he talked about happy accidents in the recording studio, rivalries within the band, meeting The Beatles when they were still The Quarrymen and his friendship with The Doors. But there’s one story in particular that resonates.

Echols used to hang out with Little Richard and his band, including an unremarkable journeyman guitarist called Jimmy James, whom Little Richard seemed to value more as a driver and a roadie than as a musician. The guitarists in all the top bands of the day were given an invention called the Vox Wah Wah pedal. Vox was hoping for some promotional value, and its pitch was that the pedal could make your guitar sound like a trombone.

“If I wanted to do that I would play a trombone,” recalled Echols. “So I put the damn thing in the closet and never never bothered with it.”

A year or so later, Echols gets a call from a friend urging him to drive across California to see this amazing new guitarist who’s come over from England: Jimi Hendrix. Excited, Echols makes the trip — and is astonished to realise that he’s seen Hendrix before: it’s Jimmy James, the driver and fill-in guitarist for Little Richard. Now he’s playing through the Wah Wah pedal — and he sounds incredible.

Without the Wah Wah pedal, Echols reflected, “there would have been no Jimi Hendrix. Jimi was the effects. That’s what made him sound different, that’s what made everybody look, because he didn’t sound like every other guitar player.”

Echols isn’t denying that Hendrix had sharpened his skills and matured into a superb musician. “I still wonder how in the space of a little over a year he goes from being just a so-so guitar player to being God . . . I always said, ‘Man, you must have taken a trip to the crossroads.’”

Still, it is hard to hear the story without thinking of the way new technologies arrive in our lives, to be embraced by some people and ignored by others. In Lynn White Jr’s famous history, Medieval Technology and Social Change, he opined that a new technology “merely opens a door, it does not compel one to enter”.

True. But once the door is open, someone is likely to be curious about what lies on the other side: your boss; your colleague; a rival company; a rival nation; a roadie who sometimes plays guitar. With this in mind, another historian of technology, Melvin Kranzberg, coined Kranzberg’s First Law: technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.

Kranzberg’s point was that technology changes the world in unexpected ways “that go far beyond the immediate purposes of the technical devices”.

The bar code is a useful example. It seems a simple enough idea, designed to speed up the process of identifying objects or types of objects. An early version from the 1950s involved machine-readable thin and thick lines on the side of railway cars. Yet the key point in the development of the bar code was not the initial eureka moment (Philadelphia graduate student Joseph Woodland combed his fingers through sand on the beach in 1948, and realised thin and thick lines could encode information) nor the practical implementation, when IBM’s George Laurer developed the familiar rectangular bar code and used lasers to scan it in the early 1970s.

Instead, it was a meeting between members of two administrative committees, one representing US retailers and the other representing food manufacturers. The meeting was tense because, of course, different interest groups had different hopes for the technology, and nothing could happen until the retailers agreed to install scanners and the manufacturers agreed to print bar codes. It took a lot of haggling but eventually they reached a compromise.

Then the playing field started to tilt. The bar code solved the kind of problem that family-run corner stores didn’t really have, such as long checkout queues, staff stealing from the till, or stocktaking. The little striped label was transformative for big-box retailers and is credited by the economist Emek Basker with helping Walmart achieve a decisive cost advantage — and catalysing the economic integration of the US and China. The simplest-seeming idea — a way to speed up checkout and stocktaking — created winners and losers on a grand scale.

What of today’s digital box of tricks, generative AI? Many journalists have received its arrival with the same enthusiasm that Echols received the Wah Wah pedal. He didn’t want to sound like a trombone; we didn’t want software that couldn’t talk to sources, wrote in clichés and sometimes made stuff up. Figuring out what to do with it required more than simply being open-minded, although open-mindedness is a start.

An old friend of mine, author and game designer Dave Morris, realised early that there was little point in asking ChatGPT to write for him. Instead, he has used NotebookLM to answer questions about his own creations (did I ever name the mountain range to the south-east of an imagined kingdom?); Claude to produce examples of “moral riddles” from late medieval literature, and to straighten out a garbled scan of an old typewritten manuscript; ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas; and Perplexity for fact-checking. It’s an impressive range of applications, and as a rebuke to those of us who think we’re too old to learn new tricks, Morris has been writing professionally for more than four decades.

I’m still struggling to make these tools work for me, but I realise I can’t afford to leave them in the closet. As Echols reflected about Jimi Hendrix, “he knew how to use [the technology] and he made it his own. He was so identified with that. He also had the foresight and the musicianship to use it properly, because I saw the same damn thing, and I didn’t do it.”

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Britain and Germany will vow on Thursday to work more closely to sell jointly made weapons, including Typhoon jets, in a deal that Downing Street claims can unlock “billions of pounds of additional defence exports”.

Exports of jointly made defence kit have been a source of tension between the two countries for years, with Germany exercising its veto right to block sales to countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Sir Keir Starmer, UK prime minister, and German chancellor Friedrich Merz will sign a treaty in London, including a commitment to pursue export campaigns together for jointly produced military equipment.

“The leaders will unveil a new agreement to boost world-class UK defence exports . . . with the two countries set to pursue joint export campaigns for jointly produced equipment,” said the UK government.

British officials said Germany would be more open in future to selling jointly made equipment such as Eurofighter Typhoons, Airbus A400M military transport aircraft and Boxer armoured vehicles to certain regimes.

A German official said the text underlined “the importance of having a reliable agenda with regard to transfers and exports” of defence-related products.

Starmer said the treaty, under which Germany would also change its laws to facilitate the fight against people smugglers moving migrants towards the Channel coast in France, would “bring the UK and Germany closer than ever”.

The previous German government, a three-way coalition that included the Greens, blocked the sale of Typhoon jets to Ankara after Turkey announced its interest to buy them in 2022, citing political and human rights concerns.

On Wednesday, a court in Turkey sentenced the biggest political rival to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, to one year and eight months in jail.

In 2024, Germany lifted its years-long opposition to selling the aircraft to Saudi Arabia.

The new German government, led by the conservative Christian Democrats with the Social Democrats as their junior partner, has promised a pragmatic approach to arms exports as it massively increases defence spending.

Their coalition agreement includes a pledge to align weapons sales “more closely with our interests in foreign, economic, and security policy” and pledged to expand support for foreign sales of weapons.

The UK will also join a multilateral agreement on arms exports between Germany, France and Spain, according to British and German officials.

A new export order for Eurofighter Typhoons would be a boost for British jobs and also allay union concerns over a loss of critical aerospace skills. 

British production of the combat aircraft, which has for decades been assembled at BAE Systems’ factory in Warton, Lancashire, recently stopped.

The factory is preparing to deliver the last Typhoon jet for Qatar under a £5bn order placed in 2017 but work on the final assembly line has ground to a halt.

BAE Systems has said it is confident of securing new export orders as conflicts in Europe and the Middle East have increased demand for the aircraft.

Unions earlier this month stepped up warnings that if no new orders were secured soon there could be a loss of important industrial skills needed to build the next generation of fighter aircraft via the UK’s role in the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), which includes Italy and Japan.

The Typhoon is built by a pan-European consortium including BAE Systems, Airbus and Leonardo, with each company building different parts for every aircraft.

They also operate a final assembly line in each partner nation — when a partner nation orders jets, or leads on an export deal, it assembles the aircraft. The UK is the lead nation on export deals to Saudi, Qatar and Turkey. 

The deal could also help to deliver more export orders for the slow-selling A400M military transport aircraft built by Airbus. The wings for the aircraft are built at Airbus’s UK factory at Filton, near Bristol. 

The Boxer armoured vehicle is built by a BAE Systems-Rheinmetall joint venture with collaboration from KNDS UK at Telford. 

Britain and Germany will also deepen co-operation between their public financial bodies — Germany’s KfW state development bank and UK bodies such as the National Wealth Fund and British Business Bank — to mobilise investment in growing businesses.

The deal will be approved by UK chancellor Rachel Reeves and German finance minister Lars Klingbeil at a G20 meeting in South Africa.