Today on Forbes, how France's Mistral built a $14 billion AI empire by not being American.

When Arthur Mench, the co-founder and CEO of Mistral, France's leading AI company, takes the stage

at the AI Action Summit in the center of New Delhi, India, in February,

he draws only a small crowd.

Nearly everyone would rather listen to sermons from OpenAI's Sam Altman or Anthropics, Dario Amade,

preaching the promises and the perils of super-intelligent AIs.

But the small cadre of executives and researchers in MENCH's audience catch a very different

message.

The rest of the world should control its own AI destiny, not Silicon Valley.

And Mench can help them do it.

He proclaims, quote, AI should be a tool for empowerment, not dominance.

Mensha's vision for Mestral and AI itself can be summed up in one word, independence.

Unlike its black box Silicon Valley rivals, most of Mestral's AI models are what techies call,

quote, open weight.

In this sort of open-source model,

customers are free to get under the hood, customize the AI using their own data, or download it for free to run offline, or from a laptop. The message resonates. Old-school execs are

spooked by the world-consuming rhetoric of open AI and anthropic

and the emerging threat of Chinese AI companies.

Mensh's talk of control and sovereignty is soothing,

as is his pitch that Mistraw will deploy engineers to set up and run the tech for them.

Your data doesn't even need to leave the office, let alone the country. Mench, who is

33 years old, is speaking to Forbes from Mistral's offices in the trendy 10th arrondissement of Paris,

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