This is AI Frontiers. Today, privacy law guards collection, but the value sits in inference. Consent governs what gets collected. Value is captured at what gets inferred. That gap is the privacy story of this decade. 6.3 billion people, 79% of the world's population, now live under a national data protection law. Almost none of those laws govern the thing that carries the value. The General Data Protection Regulation, the GDPR, was built around a model where risk lived at collection. The economics of data moved on. The consent screen did not. An AI stack does not need your record. It needs enough of everyone's fragments to predict what your record would have said. Location traces, purchase patterns, device signals, browsing rhythms. In combination, health, finances, orientation, politics, risk. Remove the name and the prediction still works. Europe's courts saw this first. Three rulings from the Court of Justice of the European Union move the regulated object from the record to the inference. In OT, August 2022, a Lithuanian official had to publish his partner's name. A name is not sensitive data. But because it is liable indirectly to reveal sexual orientation, publishing it is processing special category data. In Linden Apatheika, October 2024, an online pharmacy's order data became health data, regardless of intent and regardless of whether the inference would even be correct. In Shufa, December 2023, a credit reference agency's probability score was itself an automated decision, because banks draw on it so heavily that the score is the refusal. On the 23rd of April 2025, the European Commission fined Meta 200 million euros under the Digital Markets Act, not for collecting data, but for combining it across services without a genuine alternative. The DMA did not find the collection, it fined the combination, the step where fragments become inference. So if you buy software, the privacy notice is now the least important document in your stack. The contract is the most important. Separate collection rights from use rights. Treat we anonymize as the start of a conversation, not the end. The question is no longer what people are willing to share, it is who controls the inference engine. That's AI Frontiers.