Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Thursday, June 12th. I'm Victoria Craig for the Wall Street Journal.

Silicon Valley is a dominant force in the global AI race, but European customers say they want to break dependence on American firms.

Can a French startup be part of that solution? Then the world is running out of clean

water will introduce you to a technology that promises to fix the problem. But first, anxiety has

been rising in Europe since February when U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance took the stage at the Paris

AI summit and said this.

AI, we believe, is going to make us more productive, more prosperous, and more free.

The United States of America is the leader in AI, and our administration plans to keep it that way.

Vance criticized European regulations that the Trump administration worries

could constrain further development in artificial intelligence. But he said the U.S. is open to working

with European players. Now, French startup Mistral is stepping up to the plate. At the Viva Technology

Conference in Paris this week, WSJ Tech reporter Sam Shetner spoke to

Mistral's CEO who said demand for his company's AI tools is booming because, quote,

European leaders just don't want to be talked to that way. Sam, let's just back up a second

because I'm not sure Mistral is a household name for many of our listeners. So remind us what it is and what it does.

Mistral is a French company. It's less than two years old. And it is one of Europe's biggest

developers of large language models. It's a startup, but it's in competition with folks like

Open AI and Google when it comes to the market

of really developing this general purpose, generative AI tools for things like computer

coding, for chat bots, customer service, and their main clients are big companies and some

governments as well. So it wants to compete with the largest of the large companies

in this AI space. How competitive is it with its U.S. rivals? Because I think a lot of our audience

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