Between the American behemoths, OpenAI, Meta and Google, and Chinese newcomer DeepSeek, is there a way forward for European artificial intelligence players? France's Mistral AI and German-French-British start-up Helsing would like to think so. On Monday, February 10, at the opening of the two-day Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, the two start-ups announced a partnership, with the ambition, as stated by Guillaume Lample, Mistral's scientific director and co-founder, of "revolutionizing the defense sector," an industry that is particularly conducive to AI development.

"We share the sovereignty concerns," said Antoine Bordes, the French head of AI at Helsing (founded in Germany and present in France and the UK through two companies), adding that "Europeans have every chance provided they commit fully and are proactive."

This collaboration involves the creation of so-called "vision-language-action" models, a new generation of AI "capable of perceiving the environment via video images and then deciding on robotic actions to facilitate the piloting of a device such as a drone," said Bordes. Initial results are expected "within a few months." This agreement came as a European copy of the December 2024 announcement of a collaboration between the American defense technology specialist Anduril and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, to develop anti-drone solutions.

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