Mistral’s Mensch Pitches Open-Source AI as Key to Digital Sovereignty
At the India AI Impact Summit, the Mistral AI chief says that sovereignty demands control over models and affordable access.
Topics
News
- Legacy IT Leaders Say India’s AI Future Lies in Talent, IP
- PM Calls for Human-Centric AI at India Summit
- Mistral’s Mensch Pitches Open-Source AI as Key to Digital Sovereignty
- LeCun Questions Superintelligence Hype
- Altman Sees Superintelligence Arriving in a Couple of Years
- Inside the Debate Over AI’s Ownership Model
Open-source artificial intelligence must be the foundation of a nation’s digital autonomy, Arthur Mensch, chief executive of French AI firm Mistral AI, told the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, pitching openness and local control as strategic prerequisites in the global AI race.
“AI should be a tool for empowerment, not dominance,” Mensch said, arguing that countries cannot be dependent on closed, proprietary systems for their future technology stack. “Everyone that runs AI workloads should have access to the on and off button.”
Mensch stressed India’s unique potential in shaping the next phase of AI, noting that “a quarter of our researchers are Indian” and the country’s market scale and cultural diversity give it “immense leverage” in building differentiated AI solutions.
Speaking against the backdrop of a summit designed to position India as a global AI hub, the French executive framed open-source models as critical to sovereignty and equitable participation.
Mensch posed a critical question: Who’s in control of AI deployment, who benefits from it, and how can we ensure that it serves the masses?
Open Source as the Big Break
History bears witness that human advancements have always been built on the foundation of knowledge sharing, open collaboration, transparency and collective work.
And open-source AI (OSAI) won’t be any different. “It is what has actually allowed us to build the cloud infrastructure that today we rely on. It is what has allowed us to build a secure Internet,” he said.
Today, open-source AI stands as a rapidly growing, high-performance alternative to proprietary systems, led by Meta’s Llama series, Mistral, and DeepSeek. Organizations are rapidly shifting towards OSAI due to lower costs, increased innovation, and greater control over data and models.
Making AI Work for Us
For Mensch, AI is all about giving humans a way to delegate many of their tasks. “It’s about enhancing what serves them, and it’s about solving real problems.”
AI should be a tool that empowers people, businesses, and governments to improve the quality of life.
“However, it only works if everybody can access it and if everybody understands how to use it. That’s why multilingual AI is a strong necessity. That’s also why we need to focus on training people and on bringing them the technology at an affordable price,” he said.
With Mistral Saba, a 24-billion-parameter language model specifically designed for the Middle East and South Asia supporting Arabic, Tamil, and Malayalam, the startup is offering high-speed, cost-effective performance for applications such as conversational AI, content generation, and domain-specific tasks.
The Mistral head called for governments to play a bigger role by investing in AI infrastructure and to leverage local and regional providers.
He praised India’s self-reliant journey in AI, calling it “absolutely critical for a country this size.”
Pointing out that a quarter of Mistral AI’s researchers are Indians, Mensch said India’s “diversity of culture, ambition, market size, and industry size is giving it immense leverage when it comes to building AI.”
“The true potential of artificial intelligence is to level the playing field. This is entirely rewriting the way we build software. It is changing all of the previously established combinations, and it’s enabling every country to actually accelerate their economies,” he concluded.
Enterprise Software Faces AI Reset
Meanwhile, in a separate interview on the sidelines of the summit, Mensch said more than 50% of enterprises’ existing software could eventually be replaced by AI-driven systems, describing the shift as a major replatforming opportunity.
“The replatforming is a big opportunity for us, because we now have more than 100 enterprise customers coming to us also with the will of maybe changing and replatforming their IT system, so maybe getting rid of certain things that they bought 20 years ago, and that is starting to be a bit expensive,” Mensch said in an interview with CNBC.
He cautioned, however, that the transition must move beyond rhetoric. “In coming times, which are going to be mostly driven by AI, we need to go beyond the hype and look at what AI can actually do for our daily lives.”
