The US AI safety debate has intensified after an Anthropic researcher quit, warning that OpenAI and Anthropic are "gambling with our lives" and building technology with more than a 10% chance of killing all humans. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei then urged companies to slow down, OpenAI withheld a model over safety standards, and Anthropic reportedly cautioned IPO investors about "catastrophic or existential risks."
Mistral CEO Mensch dismissed this posture, saying the safety debate masks competitors' "negligence." He argued that the lead held by US labs is "not extremely large" and that Mistral's next-generation model will close the gap "very significantly." The company has been raising capital to scale the compute needed for bigger models, he said, so it can "own our own destiny."
Mistral takes a different approach from OpenAI and Anthropic: it works with individual companies to build custom AI tools integrated into their businesses. Unlike its US rivals, Mistral has no plans to slow down development of advanced models. Earlier this month, it raised 3 billion euros ($3.5 billion) in a funding round led by Samsung, positioning itself as a European alternative in the AI race.