France’s Mistral unveils latest model in sovereign AI push

French AI startup Mistral unveiled its largest open-weight model, nicknamed Chonk, pitching it to businesses and governments wary of handing data to closed rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI. The company says the model can be downloaded, run on private servers, and fine-tuned, and was trained on more than 160 languages using 4,000 Nvidia chips over two months.

The launch follows Mistral's 3 billion euro raise last month, Europe's largest tech fundraising ever, though its 21 billion euro valuation still trails far behind the figures floated for Anthropic's reported IPO. Mistral says Chonk's benchmark scores make it one of the best open-weight models available and ‘by far the best in Europe and the U.S.’

The company frames open weights as both a sovereignty play and a security upgrade, with its chief scientist arguing it helps defend against actors jailbreaking closed models. Competition from Chinese open-weight developers and a same-week rival launch from Reflection AI suggests the field crediting itself as best is getting crowded fast.

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