“If you think as AI as a next big technology block that our entire society will rely on, it's really like electricity. You wouldn't want someone to be able to cut power of an entire country. And that's exactly what would happen in a few years if we only depend on closed source models.”
The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026
The host asked whether the US cutting off access to closed models for non-US nationals this summer made "sovereign AI" crystallize. Mistral's VP of Science said it did, especially for new and US customers, and argued that weights copied all over the internet are much harder to cut off.
Transcript
…way. And I think that's a testimony that, at least to us, open weight is not easy in our DNA. And we really want to be able to continue open rating models, which is crucial that this kind of technology is at is like it's possible to be accessed without any control on it, given the recent events.
…summer, when the US, to simplify a bit, just shut down access to closed source models, especially to non-US nationals. How was that perceived in the rest of the world within your customer base? Was it a moment when the whole idea of sovereign AI kind of crystallized or is that a bit exaggerated?
I do think there was a crystallization moment because people realized AI access could be cut off. And if you think as AI as a next big technology block that our entire society will rely on, it's really like electricity. You wouldn't want someone to be able to cut power. Of an entire country. And that's exactly what would happen in a few years if we only depend on closed closed source models. And it's essentially not a position I would like to be in personally. So that being said, I think it crystallized on a global scale that people do care about sovereignty and access and business continuity, basically. I think it didn't change much for our customers because they were already convinced. We've been saying that for a few years already. But it changed a lot for our prospect customers and now new customers, in particular in the US. I think that's it's not a sovereignty is not only for a few countries, it's for everyone. And we want to be able to have access, guarantee the access to such models. And again, if you open weight models, so if the weights are replicated all…
So one exciting part of LeChonk's release, or Mistroll 4. So I keep calling it LeChonk, which is the internal nickname. It's not an official name, right? We made it
official due to popular demand. But the API endpoint, there are two endpoints, and there's a Mistra large 4, and I think there's the chunk in the API endpoint. But in the same model,
what's the story behind the name, just that people know?
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