ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jacob Schaal

Jacob Schaal is a Research Manager investigating AI’s labor market impacts at King’s College London and ERA Cambridge. An LSE-trained economist, he also co-writes Windfall’s Trust AI Economics Brief.

POSTS BY Jacob Schaal

20 February 2026

Jacob Schaal, Maximilian Lenner, Tunmise Akinyemi

Searching for Answers

In October 2025, following OpenAI’s disclosure that ChatGPT’s search feature had reached an average of 120.4 million monthly users in the EU, a Commission spokesperson confirmed that regulators are currently assessing whether ChatGPT can be designated as a Very Large Online Search Engine. The legal question is whether a service that synthesises answers rather than returning indexed links falls under Digital Services Act as an “online search engine”. The Commission should answer yes. A functional interpretation is legally mandated, economically justified, and urgently necessary. Continue reading >>

29 April 2024

Jacob Schaal, Tekla Emborg

Overcoming Big Tech AI Merger Evasions: Innovating EU Competition Law through the AI Act

To develop AI, computing power and access to data (aka bigness) are crucial. Now, Big Tech companies appear evading EU competition law. Companies like Google and Microsoft evade the EU Merger Regulation by entering partnerships with smaller AI labs that fall short of shifting ownership but nevertheless increase the monopolistic power of Big Tech. These quasi-mergers are particularly problematic in the context of generative AI, which relies even more than many other services on incredibly vast computing power. That is a dire state from an economic as well as a more fundamental and democratic perspective, as concentrating economic might in the hands of very few companies may cause problems down the road. Continue reading >>

Jacob Schaal

Searching for Answers

Overcoming Big Tech AI Merger Evasions: Innovating EU Competition Law through the AI Act

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