Europe must invest in its own AI companies or be left at the mercy of the US and China, says Mistral AI co-founder

European businesses are over-reliant on American AI providers and their laissez-faire attitude risks putting the continent at the mercy of closed systems and unexpected access restrictions.

That’s according to Mistral AI co-founder Arthur Mensch, who penned a column in Le Monde arguing Europe will be subject to an “an economic regime of dependence without equivalent in the history of civilization”.

Mensch claimed that “serious people” in Europe have suggested it’s better for the US and China to spend the millions or billions of Euros needed to create frontier AI models, rather than strain the European economy.

“According to them, it’s better to follow the recipe of the internet, where the value is in creating new applications and focus our efforts on what Europe knows how to do: its industrial data, its SMBs, and professional expertise. For everything else, open models created by others will suffice,” said Mensch.

“This is a fundamental error, which will cost Europe its place in the world,” he added. “AI isn’t the internet. The internet relied on open protocols that nobody owned. Closed AI models are proprietary. What an application or agent knows to do is decided by the model.”

Mensch pointed out not only can the owners of these proprietary models hike prices or retire a version of the model without user recourse, they can also cut access without notice. This isn’t hypothetical, as evidenced by Anthropic cutting off access to Fable and Mythos in June 2026.

“Access was reestablished, but the decision wasn’t taken in Europe, nor for Europeans. Nobody asked our opinion,” he added.

Mensch’s column comes amid heightened tensions over AI dependence and a rising interest in sovereign cloud and sovereign AI.

In the UK, the government established a £500 million startup fund to boost the country’s sovereign AI ambitions. Businesses in the country have also started to turn their attention towards sovereign AI in order to reduce their dependence on overseas providers.

Nevertheless, sovereign AI can have hidden costs. According to Forrester senior analyst Dario Maisto, this can mean slower roll out due to a skills deficit and a misunderstanding of what ‘sovereign’ is when it comes to infrastructure.

There’s also a monetary cost: research commissioned by CCIA Europe has claimed the EU sovereign AI bill could cost six times more than the bloc’s own upper estimate of €18 billion. Instead, the trade body – which is made up of non-EU businesses, primarily from the US – has predicted a potential cost of €115 billion over 10 years.

According to Mensch, however, the price is worth paying.

“If Europe resigns itself [to the status quo], AI will continue to be created elsewhere and we will only have access to second tier export versions, in exchange for licenses that will cost trillions of Euros,” he said.