In May, Arthur Mensch walked into a largely empty hearing room to deliver an urgent warning to the French National Assembly. For 90 minutes, the CEO of Paris-based AI company Mistral laid out his case to a small, scattered audience of lawmakers: Europe had roughly two years to build its own AI infrastructure or risk becoming a “vassal state,” permanently dependent on American technology. France could not allow foreign AI models to become enmeshed in the country’s armed forces. That kind of dependency, he warned, would be “irreparable.”
Just one month later, a snap decision in Washington, D.C., proved Mensch’s point for him.
