French president Emmanuel Macron has spent years dreaming aloud of a homegrown artificial intelligence giant. The AI disruption is coming, he told WIRED in 2018, and “I want to be part of it.” After that interview, he campaigned hard to turn France into a startup nation, home to the kind of companies that could rival American and Chinese behemoths. Then in April 2023 an answer to Macron’s ambition appeared in the form of bushy-eyebrowed entrepreneur Arthur Mensch and the launch of his company Mistral AI.
Mistral’s ChatGPT equivalent, Le Chat, was met with feverishly high expectations when it launched in February 2024, and it did not take long for comparisons to be made between Mensch and his San Francisco rival Sam Altman. Both CEOs are in their thirties. Both companies received backing from Microsoft. Like Altman, Mensch was able to command vast amounts of capital: Mistral’s $6 billion valuation fell far short of OpenAI’s $80 billion price tag, but still—this was validation. To Macron, Mistral was a sign of French genius, and the president started talking about the country as an AI champion in waiting.
This optimism was contagious. French generative AI companies have raked in $2.3 billion in funding over the past decade—more than all their European competitors, according to a June report by VC firm Accel. Amid the Paris startup scene, there was a sense that the country’s AI industry was unstoppable.
Yet when Macron called a shock snap election earlier this month, the AI industry quickly began to fear that the progress of the past seven years could be lost thanks to campaign pledges that could have a knock-on effect on their talent pipeline, and turbocharge taxes.
On Sunday, French voters will cast their ballots in the first-round voting, which polls suggest pits an anti-immigration far right against a coalition including an anti-capitalist hard left, as Macron’s centrist alliance struggles to regain ground in third place.
“With the two options that are leading in the polls, we could take a real step back, which is quite scary and quite disheartening,” says Roxanne Varza, director of the Parisian startup campus Station F, launched by the billionaire and Macron ally Xavier Niel. “We are trying to pretend it’s not happening, but we’re all talking about it, and the discussion is always, unfortunately, which is the lesser of two evils?”
Now French AI and its prominent homegrown companies and nonprofits such as Mistral, Kyutai, Hugging Face, and H are facing an uncertain future. The status quo that was such a boost to the industry is being rejected by wide swathes of voters who, according to the polls, are instead drawn to parties promising to reintroduce wealth taxes (both far right and left), tax “super-profits” (the left), and restrict immigration (the right). In response, a gloominess has fallen across the industry, and the country which once spoke of ambitions to become AI’s European capital is now busy discussing how to survive a real setback.
Varza considers Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally a real threat to the immigration that the industry needs to compete internationally. Among the 1,000 startups based at the vast Station F tech campus, there are 65 nationalities, many of whom came to Paris on Macron’s French Tech Visa program, which allows non-European startup founders, investors, and employees to move to France with their families. The government even has its own office within the Station F campus to smooth the application process for founders.
“Then on the other extreme, [the left-wing New Popular Front] have been so vocal about all the taxation measures they want to bring back that it looks like we’re just going back to pre-Macron period,” Varza says. She points to France’s 2012 “les pigeons” (or “suckers”) movement, a campaign by angry internet entrepreneurs that opposed Socialist president François Hollande’s plan to dramatically raise taxes for founders.
Maya Noël, CEO of France Digitale, an industry group for startups, is worried not only about France’s ability to attract overseas talent, but also about how appealing the next government will be to foreign investors. In February, Google said it would open a new AI hub in Paris, where 300 researchers and engineers would be based. Three months later, Microsoft also announced a record $4 billion investment in its French AI infrastructure. Meta has had an AI research lab in Paris since 2015. Today France is attractive to foreign investors, she says. “And we need them.” Neither Google nor Meta replied to WIRED’s request for comment. Microsoft declined to comment.
The vote will not unseat Macron himself—the presidential election is not scheduled until 2027—but the election outcome could dramatically reshape the lower house of the French Parliament, the National Assembly, and install a prime minister from either the far-right or left-wing coalition. This would plunge the government into uncertainty, raising the risk of gridlock. In the past 60 years, there have been only three occasions when a president has been forced to govern with a prime minister from the opposition party, an arrangement known in France as “cohabitation.”
No AI startup has benefited more from the Macron era than Mistral, which counts Cédric O, former digital minister within Macron’s government, among its cofounders. Mistral has not commented publicly on the choice France faces at the polls. The closest the company has come to sharing its views is Cédric O’s decision to repost an X post by entrepreneur Gilles Babinet last week that said: “I hate the far-right but the left’s economic program is surreal.” When WIRED asked Mistral about the retweet, the company said O was not a spokesperson, and declined to comment.
Babinet, a member of the government’s artificial intelligence committee, says he has already heard colleagues considering leaving France. “A few of the coders I know from Senegal, from Morocco, are already planning their next move,” he says, claiming people have also approached him for help renewing their visas early in case this becomes more difficult under a far-right government.
While other industries have been quietly rushing to support the far-right as a preferable alternative to the left-wing alliance, according to reports, Babinet plays down the threat from the New Popular Front. “It’s clear they come with very old-fashioned economical rules, and therefore they don’t understand at all the new economy,” he says. But after speaking to New Popular Front members, he says the hard-left are a minority in the alliance. “Most of these people are Social Democrats, and therefore they know from experience that when François Hollande came into power, he tried to increase the taxes on the technology, and it failed miserably.”
Already there is a sense of damage control, as the industry tries to reassure outsiders everything will be fine. Babinet points to other moments of political chaos that industries survived. “At the end of the day, Brexit was not so much of a nightmare for the tech scene in the UK,” he says. The UK is still the preferred place to launch a generative AI startup, according to the Accel report.
Stanislas Polu, an OpenAI alumnus who launched French AI startup Dust last year, agrees the industry has enough momentum to survive any headwinds coming its way. “Some of the outcomes might be a bit gloomy,” he says, adding he expects personal finances to be hit. “It’s always a little bit more complicated to navigate a higher volatility environment. I guess we’re hoping that the more moderate people will govern that country. I think that’s all we can hope for.”
Source : Wired
