Anthropic's new models were restricted by the US. Europe's top AI startup has been waiting for this moment.
· Business Insider
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- The US imposed export controls on Anthropic's newest AI models. In response, Anthropic closed access.
- The restrictions could play directly into Mistral's long-standing AI sovereignty pitch.
- Mistral's CEO has warned for more than a year that Europe risks becoming dependent on US AI firms.
The White House's move to restrict access to Anthropic's newest AI models could hand one of Europe's leading AI startups exactly the opening it has been preparing for.
On Friday, US officials imposed export controls on Anthropic's cybersecurity-focused models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5. They cited national security concerns that safeguards meant to prevent misuse of Fable 5 could be bypassed.
The restrictions block any foreign national from accessing the two models. Anthropic responded by suspending access to the systems altogether, creating uncertainty around who ultimately controls access to frontier AI.
The episode has the hallmarks of a scenario Mistral's CEO, Arthur Mensch, has been warning about for more than a year — and has since made part of his pitch for why people should choose it over models from US firms like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Get up to speed on Anthropic's latest drama with the White House with this cheat sheet.
Speaking at London Tech Week in June 2025, Mensch warned about American AI companies "having the keys" for their models, adding that he sees it as European companies "giving leverage to their providers."
"At some point, you need to be able to turn it off or turn it on, and you don't want to leave it to another country," he said.
Sovereign AI
Since then, the French startup has positioned itself around AI sovereignty, the idea that governments and businesses should not become overly dependent on a handful of foreign AI providers.
To do so, it has championed open-weight models that customers can deploy on their own infrastructure and customize using their own data.
"European governments are coming to us because they want to build the technology and they want to serve their citizens," Mensch said on the "Big Technology Podcast" in January.
Mensch doubled down on his position at a hearing on digital sovereignty and AI at France's National Assembly last month, warning that Europe has two years to build its own artificial intelligence infrastructure before becoming permanently dependent on American tech giants.
At Mistral's first-ever summit in Paris that same month, executives, government officials, and enterprise customers repeatedly returned to the same theme: AI sovereignty.
"You need to know where your data is and what happens to your data," Jan van den Bremen, Accenture's technology lead across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, told Business Insider at the event.
While Mistral is widely considered the top AI model provider in Europe, it lags behind the likes of Anthropic in terms of valuation, model capabilities, and user numbers. The French startup was last valued at around $13.6 billion, compared to Anthropic's $965 billion valuation.
But the Anthropic restrictions make Mistral's core argument easier to understand: Most of the time, control of AI ultimately lies with the provider and its government.
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