Skip to navigationSkip to main contentSkip to right columnAnna HeimSat, July 4, 2026 at 5:51 PM GMT+2 8 min readFollowing the Trump directive that led Anthropic to pull its latest AI models offline and growing calls for sovereign tech that reduces reliance on the U.S., Mistral AI has been caught in a whirlwind of attention. But the French AI darling is often misunderstood, and the fact that it develops large language models (LLMs) has muddied the picture. Anyone who judges Mistral by how close it is to becoming 'the OpenAI from Europe' is in for disappointment. Its chat and agent Vibe, formerly Le Chat, only has an ounce of ChatGPT's brand recognition, and Claude is more popular than Mistral's models