This would be great for us! We are building an AI agent tool and the biggest questions we get from potential customers are about the privacy issue of using non-EU providers. So having an actually good EU model would be perfect for us.
Mistral models are not very competitive with other proprietary models. Their competition is mostly from OSS models, which 1. can actually be run anywhere and 2. frequently outperform Mistral models anyway (e.g. DeepSeek 3, Kimi K2, and Qwen3 all outperform Mistral in current LMArena rankings[1]).
Hell, you can host actual frontier models (e.g. Claude 4) on AWS Bedrock in the EU, so "in the EU" (from a hosting perspective) cannot be Mistral's USP. If the proposition is "support EU businesses", then ok, but that is a different thing.
> Hell, you can host actual frontier models (e.g. Claude 4) on AWS Bedrock in the EU, so "in the EU" (from a hosting perspective) cannot be Mistral's USP.
I've seen zero cases so far where "physically present & managed in the EU but still owned by a US company" is sufficient to mitigate the typical US hosting concerns.
The threat is that AWS could be forced to a) suddenly pull services or b) spy on data by the US administration. That the DC is located entirely in the EU does nothing to reduce that risk if it's still fully owned by Amazon.
The was already a major concern for the last couple of years given the successful legal challenges against the privacy shield as sufficient data protection to give personal data to US organizations, and is way more of a concern after issues like Karin Khan and the ICC being suddenly cut off by Microsoft - it's clear that US companies literally can & will suddenly block key business services on administration whims. There's plenty of organizations where that's unacceptable risk.
> I've seen zero cases so far where "physically present & managed in the EU but still owned by a US company" is sufficient to mitigate the typical US hosting concerns.
I did. Some of my clients by design host everything on German servers of Azure and call it a day.
> Some of my clients by design host everything on German servers of Azure and call it a day.
Accepting the risk isn't the same as finding a way to mitigate it. Plenty of EU companies just happily use US cloud providers, that doesn't mean the risk doesn't exist.
That's not what that article says - it says they didn't completely cut off service to the entire ICC. The headline is confusing, but the quotes are pretty clear:
> A Microsoft spokesperson said that it had been in contact with the court since February “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services."
> Mistral models are not very competitive with other proprietary models.
As an enterprise user of various models, this is absolutely wrong and false.
What matters when using models as a service is:
- type of work involved
- speed
- cost
- law compliance
And, believe it or not your benchmarks IRL are worthless for most of the things you want to give to AI (unless we talking about coding idk).
I'll provide you few examples where Mistral is by far the best option for our companies from applications in production, even ignoring the last one.
- customer care assistance. One of my clients is in the business of home renovation, customers call the company to have details about how to install/mount specific things. For my use case: OCR + information retrieval from the scanned documents + reporting to our assistancs Mistral displayed by far the best performance (they have the best AI OCR we tested) and cost effectiveness and speed.
- creating user-tailored daily financial news. We need to summarize, rank and report what happened for user-held securities during the day. The only competitive alternative here to Mistral was Google's Gemini Flash, we need to do this for tens of thousands of users. Mistral Small was absolutely up to the task, with the Medium variant for ranking and bundling. We have tested the other options and literally nobody offered the same performance/cost/speed
All openAI models are available in the EU landing zones of Azure, run by Microsoft EU subsidiaries and in EU datacenters. Other than an irrational fear of them „phoning home“, there is no advantage here for Mistral.
It's real risk; Under oath before the French Senate, Microsoft France’s Head of Corporate, External & Legal Affairs Antoine Carniaux, said he cannot guarantee European data is safe from U.S. government access, even when stored in Europe. U.S. laws like the Patriot Act and Cloud Act require American tech firms to comply with U.S. authorities, regardless of data location.
That means, especially with a current US administration acting against EU interests, that a US based AI solution is not safe.
> Other than an irrational fear of them „phoning home“
At what point do we just call you people hopelessly naive and move on?
Microsoft? Spying on you? Inconceivable!
The US government? Spying on you through US companies? Inconceivable!
Nevermind that we have hundreds of known examples of the US government approaching Google or microsoft and forcing their hand in wiretapping their systems. And nevermind there was once a point in time where all internet traffic in the US was wiretapped. And nevermind that Microsoft's privacy policy, which YOU SIGN, outright says they will spy on you.
If trump orders the CEO of Microsoft or OpenAI to hand over data to get dirt (or company secrets) on an opponent in the EU. What do you think are the odds they would do it? Zero?
