The European Union plans to stop children under 13 from using social media and to prevent anyone under 15 from having a personal account, Ursula von der Leyen announced in her State of the Union address on Wednesday.

“No social media under the age of 13. No personal account under the age of 15,” the Commission president said, according to Bloomberg.

Still, kids who are 13 or 14 could still have accounts, but only with parental supervision and limited features. But this announcement answers a question that has divided EU countries in recent weeks, as the age limit remained undecided until Monday, with Commission experts supporting 13 and France opting for 15.

The Commission president’s announcement includes both ages if the text remains as stated today.

More details will be shared on Thursday, when the Commission will present the EU Kids Act. As for now, we have a few details on what the draft contains, such as that the law will require strict age checks on social media, video platforms, app stores, online games, AI companions, and chatbots,

Companies that will not follow the rules could face fines up to 6% of their annual sales.

Euronews, having received the draft the following day, outlined a system under which children under the age of three would be excluded, and teenagers aged 13 and 14 would have restricted accounts.

The draft also states that services must switch off features such as infinite scrolling and artificial notifications, and that “technology companies bear primary responsibility for making their products safe”.

To verify ages, platforms could use the Commission’s age verification app, which Brussels said was ready in April. The app uses zero-knowledge proofs, allowing users to prove they are old enough without sharing their identity documents.

Privacy concerns have already halted one national effort: in August, France’s Constitutional Council rejected the country’s under-15 ban, saying it was too harsh and did not protect users’ data well enough.

President Emmanuel Macron then asked Brussels to create an EU-wide rule. Other EU countries have been making their own rules since Australia banned under-16s in December, and the Commission has faced more calls to set a single standard.

No agreement will be reached quickly since the governments are still divided, with both Estonia and Belgium opposing age-based bans in full, and the European Parliament having earlier called for an age limit of 16; the proposal must have the support of both sides before it can become law, a process which Bloomberg has pointed out can take years.

The text that will be unveiled on Thursday will illustrate the extent to which the 13-and-15 formula remains valid when exposed to the draft and how far the new rules apply to AI chatbots.

The first benchmarks for the M6 Mac mini have emerged. While Moore’s Law is in fact dead, the Mac mini is still getting a massive and noticeable boost in processing performance.

Ahead of the release of Apple’s product launches to consumers, benchmarks for the models frequently surface, hinting at what’s on the way. That has seemingly happened for the M6 Mac mini, which Apple introduced at the end of August.

The Geekbench 7 listing for a “Mac18,5” posted on September 15 mentions it is a Mac with an M6 chip, complete with 12 cores. The listing adds that it has a base frequency of 4.78GHz, up from the 4.4Ghz M4 Mac mini and the 3.2GHz M1 Mac mini.

At the time of reporting, there is only one listing appearing for a “Mac18,5” for Geekbench 7’s CPU benchmarks, with none for GPU or AI testing so far.

While we would prefer to see multiple benchmarks that can back up these figures, they do seem plausible enough to be real. As consumers get their hardware, expect more results to come out and to solidify just how much better the M6 is over its predecessors.

Single-core scores under Geekbench 7

On the single-core test, the M6 Mac mini is shown to have achieved a score of 4,071. By comparison to the previous base Mac mini model, the M4, that works out to be a 24% improvement.

It’s also 69% better than the M2 Mac mini. The 89% improvement almost doubles the score of the M1 Mac mini.

Multi-core scores under Geekbench 7

The change is more startling on the multi-core side of things. At 22,783, the M6 Mac mini is 48% better at multi-core tasks than the M4 Mac mini.

Compared against the M2 Mac mini, the M6 is 132% better. That extends to 165% when the M1 Mac mini is taken into consideration.

It’s said that consumers will only really notice a difference in processing performance if it is about 15% better or worse. If these figures are correct, the first buyers to receive their new Mac mini will definitely be able to feel the difference.

Boox has unveiled three new E Ink devices.

In the speech she gave in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Ursula Von der Leyen agreed to the AI industry’s call for a slowdown.

“The EU would arrange a discussion with the major AI labs on how public authorities can support the industry’s efforts to pace the frontier of this disruptive technology, ” the Commission president said, according to Euronews’ live reporting.

She based her case on the companies’ own words.

“The CEOs of the most advanced companies have told us that it is time to slow down with regard to self-recursive models,” she said to the MEPs, and then went on to state that “if the people who are developing the technology are of the opinion that this is so, then we should be too.”

Ursula Von der Leyen did not give a date for the meeting and mentioned none of the companies that would be invited.

The term “pace the frontier” was created by Dario Amodei of Anthropic, who in his essay of 12 September urged competing laboratories to slow down the rate at which they improve their capabilities, to agree to have third parties based within them carry out the evaluations, and to apply for an antitrust exemption in Washington so as to enable coordination.

Sam Altman and Elon Musk also supported this stance on that same day. However, on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta took the opposite position, saying on X that competition already gives labs an incentive to build safely.

On the other hand, Ursula Von Leyen presented the matter as a question of security. She stated that “hacking on a scale that we never thought possible” would be made possible by frontier models, and that these models would soon fall into the hands of our adversaries.

As reported by Euronews, she also cited recent instances of AI agents escaping their testing environments and launching attacks on other systems, such as the Hugging Face breach, in which agents operating within OpenAI’s evaluation environment broke out and compromised Hugging Face’s infrastructure during the summer.

She said that the EU would work with “like-minded partners such as Canada, the UK and others” on model evaluation, verification, early warning, and AI security.

Brussels arrives at the table with more than an invitation, as the Commission president reminded the chamber that the AI Act gives the Commission supervisory powers over the risk-mitigation measures that developers of the most advanced models put in place, and those powers became enforceable in August.

In the span of just over two weeks this summer, three of the world’s most closely watched AI developers admitted the same uncomfortable thing. Their own models broke out of the sandbox and touched systems they were never supposed to interact with.

OpenAI disclosed on July 21 that models it was evaluating exploited a vulnerability and compromised production infrastructure at Hugging Face, an incident the company said was driven end-to-end by an autonomous agent with no human directing it.