Mistral CEO clearly rejects selling out to Silicon Valley giants, saying they can uncover vulnerabilities comparable to Anthropic

According to Beating Monitoring, Mistral AI co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch recently made a strong statement at a hearing in the French National Assembly.
Faced with lawmakers’ concerns about whether the company will be acquired by American giants, he explicitly refused.
Mensch criticized the industry trend of European startups always thinking about selling to Silicon Valley for cashing out, bluntly stating that as long as a company is successful, it won’t be acquired; being acquired is, in a sense, a failure.
At the same time, he publicly challenged the American safety benchmark Anthropic for the first time, claiming that Mistral’s models are fully capable of identifying all the network vulnerabilities found by Mythos.

To support its ambition for independent development, Mistral has invested as much as 1 billion euros in R&D this year.
Mensch revealed that currently 75% of the company’s revenue comes from Europe.
In terms of technological approach, Mistral insists on concentrating computing power internally to train large models, then using distillation techniques to provide more efficient smaller models to customers.
To ensure autonomous computing power, the company plans to build an 80 MW computing cluster in France next year and aims to reach a scale of 1 GW by 2029.

Mensch emphasized that the essence of AI is converting electrical energy into tokens.
Since it mainly relies on nuclear power, deploying computing power in France can greatly reduce the carbon footprint.
Using the example that building a 1 GW data center costs 50 billion euros, he pointed out that electricity costs actually account for only 10% of the final output value.
He warned that if Europe retreats now due to high costs, it will not only completely lose control of the underlying computing power but also that relying solely on imported US AI services in the future will lead to an annual trade deficit of trillions of euros.