‘We’re doomed’: French minister warns against relying on Mistral for AI

The Mistral AI logo is displayed on a smartphone in an illustration taken on September 3, 2026. France’s finance minister has warned that Europe’s AI ambitions cannot depend on a single company. — AFP pic

First Published: Thursday, 03 Sep 2026 1:49 PM MYT

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 3 — European sovereignty in artificial intelligence (AI) cannot depend on a single startup like Mistral, France’s Finance Minister Roland Lescure warned on Wednesday, amid tensions between the United States and China over the technology’s development.

The French government holds an indirect stake in Mistral, which is considered Europe’s top AI model developer though its technology lags behind Chinese and American competitors.

‘If European AI is just about Mistral, then we’re doomed. We can’t just say we’re going to put our eggs in one basket and that’s it. It’s a whole ecosystem that we need to develop,’ Lescure said in a meeting with reporters on the sidelines of a visit to Silicon Valley, where he was expected to meet with investors and AI companies such as OpenAI and Stripe.

When asked by AFP about the possibility that Mistral might abandon developing state-of-the-art AI models to become primarily a provider of computing infrastructure, Lescure declined to directly weigh in.

‘What I want is an ecosystem that puts Europe and France at the forefront. Hopefully Mistral will keep on doing this. How they’re going to do it, we’ll see,’ he said, and praised Mistral as ‘a company that we can be proud of.’

In June, the European Commission tasked an Italian-German consortium with developing a European state-of-the-art model on the EU’s public supercomputers.

‘US frontier models are ahead of the curve, but Chinese models are not far behind, and there’s stuff going on in Europe which might lead to development as well,’ Lescure noted.

Valued at nearly €12 billion (RM56.1 billion), Mistral has increased its spending on infrastructure this year, including a data centre, its first, which will be built in France, in addition to a commercial agreement with Microsoft. It continues to release new models, as well.

When asked about the risk of the Trump administration potentially blackmailing Europeans by cutting off their access to the best models, Lescure said: ‘one word: unpredictability.’

In June, Washington forced Anthropic, the creator of Claude, to cut off access to all foreign nationals to its most powerful models for two weeks, renewing concerns in Europe about the Old Continent’s technological dependence. — AFP