France could not allow foreign AI models to become enmeshed in the country’s armed forces. The big question is whether Mistral is actually ready to take up the mantle of European AI champion that so many desperately want it to seize. Perhaps more critically, Mistral’s AI models also aren’t currently competitive with the bleeding-edge American AI systems from Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google DeepMind, or even models from some Chinese AI powers. Arthur Mensch onstage with cofounders Timothée Lacroix (left) and Guillaume Lample at Mistral’s AI Now Summit in Paris. Three months later, it released its debut model, Mistral 7B—a freely downloadable model that beat Meta’s Llama 2 13B on benchmark tests despite being about half the size.