Microsoft Strikes Deal With France’s Mistral, OpenAI Rival (2)

Microsoft Corp., under mounting political scrutiny globally for its deep ties to OpenAI, has cut a deal with the startup’s primary competition in Europe.

On Monday, the French company Mistral AI announced a “strategic partnership” with Microsoft that includes making the startup’s latest artificial intelligence models available to customers of Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Mistral develops algorithmic models similar to those from OpenAI used for chatbots and other AI services, but Mistral models are open-source and shared openly.

With the announcement, the company also unveiled a model, called Mistral Large, that it says has “unique reasoning capacities” and is ...