Mistral AI, the French AI company, has been caught in a whirlwind of attention following the Trump directive that led Anthropic to pull its latest models offline and growing calls for sovereign tech. However, the article argues that Mistral is often misunderstood. While some judge it by how close it is to becoming 'the OpenAI from Europe,' the company is actually following the Palantir playbook, with forward-deployed engineers helping governments and large corporations adopt and tailor AI for their use cases. This approach is better suited for Mistral's means. While the company is rumored to be raising $3.5 billion at a $23.15 billion valuation, that's still far less than U.S. frontier labs. However, its revenues have ramped up significantly, with annual recurring revenue above $400 million in February, up from $20 million a year earlier, and it claims to be on track to surpass $1 billion in ARR this year. Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch has become a public ambassador for a certain vision of AI, breaking down in a LinkedIn post that the company deploys its models and agent platform on enterprise customers' infrastructure and helps them build custom models with its Forge platform. Mensch wrote that the company exists to ensure everyone gets access to the best AI systems outside of centralized control. Mistral is looking beyond the enterprise and aims to keep investing in research to keep up with foundational AI rivals. Mensch claimed that while they do not yet own the best language models, they have constantly reduced that gap, and they have a very exciting open-weight model coming this summer. In domains like voice, vision, and document processing, Mensch stated they have state-of-the-art solutions.
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