When Arthur Mensch, the cofounder and CEO of Mistral, France’s leading AI company, takes the stage at the AI Action Summit in the center of New Delhi, India, in February, he draws only a small crowd. Nearly everyone would rather listen to sermons from OpenAI’s Sam Altman or Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, preaching the promises and perils of superintelligent AIs.

But the small cadre of executives and researchers in Mensch’s audience catch a very different message: The rest of the world should control its own AI destiny, not Silicon Valley. And Mensch can help them do it. “AI should be a tool for empowerment, not dominance,” he proclaims.

Mensch’s vision for Mistral, and AI itself, can be summed up in one word: independence. Unlike its black-box Silicon Valley rivals, most of Mistral’s AI models are what techies call “open weight.” In this sort of open-source model, customers are free to get under the hood, customize the AI using their own data or download it for free to run offline (or from a laptop).

The message resonates. Old-school execs are spooked by the world-consuming rhetoric of OpenAI and Anthropic and the emerging threat of Chinese AI companies. Mensch’s talk of control and sovereignty is soothing, as is his pitch that Mistral will deploy engineers to set up and run the tech for them. Your data doesn’t even need to leave the office, let alone the country.

“We are really the only company that allows [building] core business automation and products on top of an open stack, and that is something that is valuable everywhere in the world,” says Mensch, 33, from Mistral’s offices in the trendy 10th arrondissement of Paris, as kids play soccer in the courtyard out back.

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European firms are especially interested in Mistral. At a time when a German state government is scrapping Microsoft Office for official business, and France is rolling out its own alternative to Zoom for video calls, there’s opportunity for Mensch to swoop in with the promise of secure and proudly European-built AI.

Donald Trump is another driver of business. The president’s trade war, threats to annex Greenland and promises to shield American tech companies from regulation have sparked concerns about reliance on anything American—from software to data centers and now AI. “The independence we provide to our customers is critical for our product,” Mensch says.

Mistral needs all the extra edge it can get. Mensch and cofoun­ders Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix are some of France’s finest technical talent, hailing from the Parisian outposts of top Ameri­can AI labs. But Mistral has slipped ever further behind in leader­boards ranking AI performance. It’s so bad that Mistral’s best model would lose in a face-off against a version of Anthropic’s Claude that was released nine months earlier, per one popular benchmark. Worse, it’s also bested by a new crop of open-weight models from Chinese startup DeepSeek and tech giant Alibaba.

That’s not surprising. Mistral’s American rivals are loaded with cash. They are willing to spend more per year than the $3.1 billion Mistral has raised to date (including from French institutions such as BNP Paribas and Bpifrance). Its Chinese competitors claim they can train AI models more cheaply, but they are widely suspected of “distilling” secrets from American AI giants by prompting Claude and ChatGPT millions of times to train their models.

In a space obsessed with performance, that should make Mistral an also-ran. But........

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