Paris-headquartered Mistral will use the tech giant’s Azure cloud service to train and run its large language models (LLMs). The two firms will jointly develop products for clients like European governments. The financial terms of Microsoft’s investment were not disclosed. (The Logic, Financial Times)

Talking point: In San Francisco-based OpenAI, Microsoft already has an AI startup partner that uses its compute and feeds it LLMs. Mistral, just 10 months old, offers an inverse proposition—European rather than American; mostly open source rather than proprietary. Also on Monday, the startup released Le Chat, its own query-answering bot to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Microsoft offers both firms’ LLMs via Azure, as well as those of Anthropic, Toronto’s Cohere, Meta and others. Monday’s deal comes as competition regulators study tie-ups between tech giants and AI startups. Authorities in the EU, U.K., and U.S. are scrutinizing Microsoft’s OpenAI investment.