Our daily lap around the world: EU regulators had a big day

🤖 The European Parliament approved a draft of the first Western laws governing AI. Yesterday, EU lawmakers voted in favor of new legislation that would require companies to disclose when content is AI-generated, impose a near-total ban on using AI in facial recognition software, and mandate that companies publish the copyrighted data used to train their AI models, among other things. The new EU law is on track to be enacted by the end of this year, pending approval from all 27 member-countries. Separately, a four-week-old French startup called Mistral AI raised ~$113 million in Europe’s biggest seed investment round ever, per a new Financial Times report.

🌐 Google’s ad business allegedly violates EU antitrust laws, per a new lawsuit from regulators. The European Commission is claiming Google has abused its ownership of the world’s largest ad marketplace to give its own products like YouTube or Search an unfair advantage when buying or selling ads, in addition to suppressing competition from rival firms. If found guilty, Google could face a fine of up to 10% of its annual worldwide revenue – $280 billion in 2022 – and could also be forced to sell its ad marketplace or other ad-related businesses.

💰📉 And in non-EU-related news: Global economic inequality is currently at its lowest point in 150 years. That’s according to a new report from Branko Milanovic, one of the world's leading inequality researchers. The report focuses on the global Gini coefficient, a number that runs on a scale from 0 (perfect equality) to 100 (one person has all of the world's income). And by that measure, Milanovic found global inequality fell from a historic peak of 69 in 2000 to 60 in 2018, and is very likely even lower today.