“AI for citizens”: Mistral AI takes a stand against big tech

French AI manufacturer Mistral has launched an initiative to make progress through artificial intelligence (AI) more citizen-friendly through various projects. At the same time, the company is criticizing large tech companies: their AI products are usually a black box and “one size fits all” offering for users. For users, these are completely opaque technologies with the approach: one variant for all use cases. However, this is neither suitable for the short-term nor the long-term individual needs of countries.

Such a development of AI in society also makes people dependent on these closed systems, which are “developed and operated by distant, huge corporations”, emphasized Mistral in an announcement of the initiative on its website. It is clear “that artificial intelligence will have a significant and lasting impact not only on companies, but also on governments and societies”, Mistral continues.

Mistral AI to better serve citizens

In the rush to deploy AI, however, it all too often seems as if AI is something “inevitable that happens to people and countries and over which they have no control.” In order to counter the development described by Mistral, the company has now launched the “AI for Citizens” initiative.

According to Mistral, the aim is to support governments and public institutions in strategically using AI for the benefit of their citizens by transforming public services, driving innovation and ensuring competitiveness.

Company wants to enter the cloud business

The company is already working with governments, defense forces, authorities and educational institutions worldwide – including France, Luxembourg, Singapore, the Netherlands, England and Switzerland. Mistral does not provide any specific examples; the website only contains information about customer relationships with various private companies.

In addition to the business with AI models, Mistral also wants to position itself as a cloud provider. At Viva Tech 2025 in Paris, where German Chancellor Friedrich Merz was also a guest, the company announced a corresponding partnership with chip manufacturer Nvidia. The two companies plan to jointly build a series of AI data centers in France. This will enable Mistral to offer not only AI models, but also computing capacities, which is important in order to keep up with tech companies such as OpenAI or Microsoft, from which Mistral wants to differentiate itself to some extent with the “AI for Citizens” initiative.

Partnership with Microsoft

Meanwhile, Mistral is also in a multi-year partnership with Microsoft to offer its own AI services via Microsoft’s Azure cloud and drive forward next-generation language models. The two companies announced the partnership in February 2024. As part of this partnership, Microsoft was also to take a small stake in Mistral, the Financial Times reported at the time. However, neither company provided any details.

(nen)