Competition: EU to examine partnership between Microsoft and Mistral AI

The European Commission will examine the partnership between Microsoft and the French start-up Mistral in conversational artificial intelligence, after having already announced that it was studying the impact on competition of the American software giant's investment in OpenAI, creator by ChatGPT. Less than a year after its creation, Mistral AI, one of the two AI champions in Europe, unveiled a partnership with Microsoft on Monday.

The Redmond (Washington State) group explained that it was a “multi-year” agreement which will notably allow the French start-up to be present on its professional Azure AI platform used by client companies to create applications using artificial intelligence. A Microsoft spokesperson clarified that the partnership included “an investment of 15 million euros” which would be “converted into capital during Mistral’s next funding round”.

This announcement is being scrutinized by the European competition watchdog, worried about the domination of this crucial market by a handful of American giants. “We will examine” this partnership, declared a spokesperson for the European Commission. More broadly, “the Commission is examining the agreements concluded between major players in the digital market and developers and suppliers of generative AI,” he recalled.

Mistral AI, founded in April 2023 by former Google and Meta researchers, is valued at around $2 billion, according to financial sources. The company claims for its conversational AI, currently available to the general public in beta version, performance comparable to that of ChatGPT-4 from the pioneer OpenAI.

If the European Commission deems it necessary, it could open a formal investigation into the partnership with Microsoft in order to identify a possible abuse of the software giant's dominant position. The Commission had already announced on January 9 that it was examining Microsoft's multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI. She then explained that she wanted to “study the impact of these partnerships on market dynamics”.