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You've seen the AI demos. Viktor does it without you watching.
The AI tool you tried last quarter waited for a prompt, hallucinated a number, then asked if you'd like a summary.
Viktor opened a PR at 2am, rebased it against main, ran your test suite, and posted a note in #eng: "Two flaky tests in payments service, both pre-existing. Recommended merging after fixing them." Then drafted the customer reply for the support ticket the bug created.
That's 619K autonomous actions per day across 20,000+ teams. Not chat replies. Real work shipped to GitHub, Stripe, Linear, Notion, and 3,000+ other tools, from inside Slack and Microsoft Teams.
You don't supervise him any more than you supervise a senior engineer.
SOC 2 certified. Your data never trains models.
"It's what you probably originally thought AI was going to be when you first heard of it in sci-fi movies." Tyler, CEO.
Dear Sentinels
Qwant, the privacy-focused search engine from France established in 2013, has found itself in the limelight. As of 4 June 2026, it is now the default search engine on the European Parliament’s Microsoft Edge and Firefox browsers. That means Google has been unceremoniously booted from the computers of 720 lawmakers and a small army of assistants and admin staff. Politico broke the news, citing an internal email to MEPs. Parliament officials say the switch is all about digital sovereignty and keeping users’ personal data safe. Qwant sets itself apart from Google by not tracking users, not building behavioural profiles, and steering clear of targeted ads. Of course, Google still has about 90 per cent of Europe’s search market, and staff can switch back if they fancy. Still, this is one of the clearest signs yet that Europe is serious about cutting the cord with American tech, at least when it comes to searching for cat videos.
But before we get too carried away, let’s see what the World Wide Web has delivered to our digital doorstep this week.
News from around The Web
IBM stock craters 25%, the worst day on record, after company issues second-quarter earnings warning
A Narrative History of Qwant
Search engines are, quite frankly, the bedrock of our digital lives. They’re the front door to the internet for citizens and institutions alike. These days, geopolitics and technology are so tangled up you’d need a quantum computer just to sort them out. That’s why building European alternatives to the usual global suspects is absolutely vital if we want any real digital autonomy. Without their own tools, Europe is stuck peering at the world through someone else’s window, with all our research, data, and culture filtered by foreign companies and their legal quirks. If we want true digital sovereignty, it starts with being able to navigate the web on our own terms, no passport required.
Qwant was born out of the need for a home-grown alternative, and even its name is a bit of a brain teaser. It’s a mash-up of the French word quantique (think quantum theory) and the English word want. So, it’s about the urge to discover and the thrill of the hunt, very on brand for a search engine. The story starts in May 2011 in Nice, with founders Jean-Manuel Rozan, Éric Léandri, and Patrick Constant. After some early brainstorming and a beta run in fifteen countries, Qwant officially launched in France in July 2013. The founders wanted to do things differently: respect user anonymity, say no to tracking for ads, and avoid fiddling with results to suit anyone’s agenda. Of course, turning these lofty ideals into a working search engine turned out to be a bit more complicated than just picking a clever name.
If you want a resilient digital economy, you need to own your own infrastructure. Renting from foreign tech giants is all well and good, until they change the locks or double the rent. For a long time, Qwant was more of a metasearch engine, leaning heavily on APIs from the likes of Microsoft Bing. That worked until 2023, when Microsoft hiked up its Bing API prices and gave everyone a nasty shock. In response, Qwant teamed up with German search engine Ecosia to launch the European Search Perspective, which led to the creation of the Staan index (that’s Search Trusted API Access Network, for acronym fans). The idea was to build a truly sovereign search backbone. Mozilla also chipped in, helping to create special Firefox versions and open-source apps that put privacy first. These technical leaps set the stage for Qwant’s big political moment.
When a government picks a default search engine, it’s not just about convenience, it’s a political statement about trust, security, and who gets to peek at your search history. So, when the European Parliament decided on 3 June 2026 to make Qwant the default in Microsoft Edge and Firefox, it was a big deal. Don’t worry, it’s not a ban on other search engines; staff can still switch if they’re feeling rebellious. This move followed a growing trend in France, where ministries and agencies had already started trusting Qwant with their searches. The real reason? Parliamentary staff often search for sensitive topics, and nobody wants that data ending up in the wrong hands. This wave of institutional support gave Qwant the breathing room it needed to handle the inevitable regulatory headaches.
Taking on the global tech giants is never a smooth ride, and Qwant’s journey has had its fair share of bumps. For a company built on privacy, things got tricky when France’s data watchdog, CNIL, started asking awkward questions. In 2019 and again in 2025, they pointed out issues with how Qwant handled data sent to outside partners. The real eyebrow-raiser was the revelation that Qwant had been sharing user data (like IP addresses, browser info, and keywords) with Microsoft Bing Ads since 2016, but only admitted it in 2021. Even so, Qwant has played a big part in shaking up the search market, joining antitrust complaints that led to the EU’s 2021 “choice screens” on Android. Qwant made the top five, helped by a bit of corporate reshuffling between 2019 and 2021, and was eventually snapped up by Octave Klaba’s Synfonium (with the French state keeping a quarter stake). The idea was to build a more sustainable, French-owned tech ecosystem, one ready for whatever the next decade throws at us.
The next big battleground for digital autonomy is where search meets generative AI. If you don’t control your own search index, your AI ends up learning from someone else’s homework, which is hardly ideal. Qwant has tackled this with its “Réponse Flash” project, teaming up with Mistral AI to offer AI-generated summaries that also help keep the press in business. There are rules, though: each summary must use at least two sources and is capped at 500 characters per source, nudging users to actually visit the original articles. On top of that, Qwant has opened up the Staan API, giving the AI sector a much-needed home-grown web index, just as the big global players start locking things down. Looking back, it’s clear: a search engine only counts as public infrastructure if it’s run and owned right here at home. As Europe rolls out its 2026 tech sovereignty plans for chips, cloud, and AI, having our own search index is still the foundation for a digital future that’s truly ours.
The strategic importance of search engines cannot be overstated, as they represent the foundational layer of modern digital infrastructure and the primary gateway through which citizens and institutions interact with the global information landscape. In an era where geopolitics and technology have become inextricably entwined, the development of European alternatives to dominant global providers is an essential prerequisite for regional autonomy. Without such sovereign tools, the continent remains in a state of permanent dependency, where its research, data, and cultural priorities are filtered through the lens of foreign corporate interests and extra-territorial legal jurisdictions. The quest for digital sovereignty begins with the ability to navigate the web independently, ensuring that the discovery of information remains a neutral and secure process.
