European Union to study Mistral AI / Microsoft partnership 

Deal between French startup and US giant causes uproar in Brussels. 

On February 27, 2024, the European Commission announced it would “examine” the future partnership between Microsoft and the French startup Mistral AI. Announced on February 26, 2024, the new relationship between the two companies provides for a 15-million-euro investment by Microsoft in Mistral AI, “which Mistral will be able to convert into capital during their next fundraising round.”

Moreover the French startup will launch a closed large language model (LLM), Mistral Large, which it maintains will be able to compete with Chat GPT-4. The LLM will be available to corporations only, not the general public. Thus Mistral AI is dropping its “100% open source approach.”

The Microsoft partnership entails incorporating Mistral Large in the tech giant’s cloud offer, probably exclusively. In exchange, Mistral AI will benefit from Microsoft Azure’s computing power. 

The announcement caused uproar in Brussels. Mistral AI was indeed championed as a sovereign European AI. And the French government specifically fought to alleviate constraints on AI designers in the recently passed AI Act to support the model. 

“On a technical and political level in (European) Parliament, we are especially furious because the French government spent months pushing this European leadership argument, according to which these (European AI) companies should be able to grow without the help of Chinese and American companies,” thus maintained Kai Zenner, digital policy advisor to German MEP Axel Voss.

“The whole thing seems to have been a façade for the US-influenced Big Tech lobby. […] European regulators were fooled,” even asserted Kim van Sparrentak, a Dutch MEP who worked on the AI Act.