Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch is pushing back against Pope Leo XIV’s recent call for AI to be “disarmed,” arguing that Europe can’t afford to fall behind U.S. tech giants in the race for advanced AI.
“We’re all for peace, but if you look at our rivals and adversaries in the world, they’re using artificial intelligence … As long as we have adversaries that are threatening, and they are threatening, we do need to have our own capabilities,” Mensch told reporters when asked about the Pope’s comments on Thursday, Reuters reports.
Mensch’s remarks came as Mistral announced it is building a new 10-megawatt data center near Paris and signed new deals with European giants Airbus and BMW. The French AI company is trying to establish itself as Europe’s homegrown alternative to U.S.-based AI rivals like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Microsoft.
Meanwhile, Pope Leo XIV took on AI this week in a new encyclical that touched on everything from deepfakes and AI companions to the technology’s impact on the job market and warfare.
“In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human,” the Pope wrote in his encyclical titled Magnifica Humanitas.
Meanwhile, Mistral executives argue that the company, and Europe more broadly, need to achieve artificial general intelligence and eventually superintelligence as a matter of geopolitical security.
“Very soon in the future, we are probably going to see AGI or superintelligence, so it is very important that we have access to these models also in Europe,” Guillaume Lample, Mistral’s co-founder and chief scientist, said this week, according to The Wall Street Journal. “If we don’t have access to it, I think we can only imagine how bad it is going to be.”
Lample insisted that the emergence of these advanced models could lead to a cure for cancer and other major scientific breakthroughs that Europe could be blocked from accessing if it does not have its own superintelligent AI.
That sentiment comes as the Trump administration’s foreign policies toward Europe, including tariffs and talk of taking over Greenland, have helped fuel calls among European leaders for greater independence from U.S.-based technology.
“In this new geopolitical environment, Europe has to become a geopolitical power,” French President Emmanuel Macron said at the Munich Security Conference in February. “It’s ongoing, but we have to accelerate and clearly deliver all the components of a geopolitical power, in defence, in technology, and in the derisking vis-à-vis all the big powers in order to be much more independent.”
Earlier this year, the French government announced it would stop using American video conferencing platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom, and instead use the French platform Visio. France has also signed a deal for its armed forces to use Mistral’s models and software.
And it’s not just France. The rest of Europe is also looking to become more tech-independent. The European Commission is reportedly working on legislation aimed at promoting tech sovereignty across the bloc. That tech sovereignty package is expected to be unveiled on June 3.
Mensch’s argument echoes one we’ve seen play out stateside in recent years, with American big tech giants insisting they have no choice but to move full steam ahead on AI infrastructure development because China’s progress in the field represents an urgent national security issue. One might say that Europe is just starting to catch up to America when it comes to state-of-the-art fearmongering.
Meanwhile, China’s strongest AI labs have leaned heavily into open-weight releases—models whose weights can be downloaded and reused—while the top U.S. frontier labs still mostly keep their best systems closed.
