GRC Report Staff

New consumer protection rules against greenwashing began applying on September 27, bringing into force a set of restrictions that reach directly into the words, labels and environmental promises businesses place in front of consumers. Directive (EU) 2024/825, adopted in February 2024, amends the EU’s Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and Consumer Rights Directive. Member States had until March 27, 2026, to transpose it into national law. Those measures have now entered into application.

Finland’s financial regulator sees room to make the rulebook simpler. What it does not see is a reason to surrender the resilience that has allowed the country’s financial sector to withstand years of economic and market uncertainty.

Sustainability reporting used to be a document. At many large companies, it is now an institution, with its own staff, calendar, controls, and internal audit trail. The 2026 edition of the State of Play study from the IFAC, AICPA, and CIMA found that 97 percent of the world's largest companies disclosed some form of sustainability information in 2024, and 75 percent obtained some level of third-party assurance over it, up from 73 percent the year before and just 51 percent in 2019, the first year the study ran.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission spent 5 years looking under the hood of AI systems before putting much of what it had seen into a single report. From 2021 through 2025, the regulator engaged with controllers over the creation, launch, and deployment of approximately 180 AI products and services. Behind that number sat thousands of pages of briefings, risk assessments, descriptions of technical and organizational measures, and compliance documentation. The work stretched from large language models and recommender systems to facial recognition, age assurance, personalization, and AI agents.

Nearly every senior AI executive surveyed by EY says their organization has formal rules governing artificial intelligence. Nearly half say those rules have been bypassed when a deployment was urgent. That runs through EY's new AI Risk and Governance Survey, which found that large US companies are rapidly putting AI and autonomous agents to work while struggling to keep their governance processes aligned with the technology.

The United States has asked an EU court for a place in the legal fight over the European Commission’s €120 million fine against X, arguing that the case reaches beyond one social media platform and into the limits of European authority over American companies and their owners.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced an investigation into data center developments that have not responded to the Texas Water Development Board’s Water Use Survey. His office said the investigation is ongoing and is intended to ensure data centers provide accurate, current information about their water use.