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While the AI market has in recent days seemed to collapse around DeepSeek and OpenAI, there are of course many other teams of brilliant engineers fielding large language models (LLMs) that are worth a look as users and enterprises seek to use the latest and greatest.
Take Mistral AI, the French startup that made headlines even before it launched with a record-setting seed funding round of $640 million, and which has quietly been training and releasing a mix of open-source and proprietary models for consumers and enterprises.
Even as the rise of new reasoning models and agents have dominated the AI landscape, Mistral is still positioning itself as a viable alternative to OpenAI’s signature chatbot ChatGPT and DeepSeek’s hit mobile app, especially for those concerned with data privacy and security.
Today, Mistral finally launched its own free, mobile version of its chatbot Le Chat for iOS and Android, as well as a new Enterprise tier for private infrastructure, and a Pro plan at $14.99 per month. The move suggests that Mistral AI is making a concerted push to convince companies there are worthwhile alternatives to DeepSeek and OpenAI.
Mistral’s Le Chat offers business leaders an AI tool that integrates with enterprise environments, operates with high-speed performance and — importantly for some customers — does not send user data to China, unlike DeepSeek.
Mistral targets both consumers and enterprises with savvy new releases
Mistral AI’s latest rollout comes at a time when enterprises are increasingly evaluating AI partners based on data privacy, security and deployment flexibility.
The launch of Le Chat’s Enterprise tier, which allows businesses to deploy the assistant on private infrastructure, SaaS or virtual private cloud (VPC), suggests that Mistral is targeting the same corporate users who may have previously considered OpenAI’s GPT-4 or Anthropic’s Claude, but want more control over their data and models.
Mistral’s strategy mirrors a recent move by DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company that released DeepSeek-R1, a powerful reasoning model that offers capabilities and performance similar to OpenAI’s “o” series of models (o1, o1-mini and o3-mini out now, with o3 full soon to follow) but at a fraction of the lost (30 times less expensive for enterprise users than OpenAI o1).
However, DeepSeek’s expansion has been met in the West with privacy and security concerns related to China’s data retention and censorship laws. Some analysts have raised questions about whether AI models developed by Chinese firms could be subject to Beijing’s data access regulations, prompting enterprises to proceed cautiously when integrating such systems.
For companies concerned about where their AI models process and store data, Le Chat’s non-Chinese infrastructure could be a key selling point. Unlike DeepSeek, which operates under a Chinese legal framework, Mistral AI is a European company based in France, subject to EU data privacy laws (GDPR) rather than China’s Cybersecurity Law or the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL).
Mistral AI is betting that Le Chat’s performance advantages will also help it stand out.
The mobile app is powered by the company’s latest low-latency AI models, which, Mistral says, enable “flash answers” — a feature that generates responses at speeds of up to 1,000 words per second.
Beyond speed, Le Chat differentiates itself by integrating real-time web search and sourcing from journalistic and social media platforms, allowing for fact-grounded responses rather than relying solely on pre-trained knowledge.
This makes Le Chat a potential alternative for businesses that require more up-to-date, evidence-based AI insights rather than static model training data.
For enterprises, Le Chat also includes:
- Code interpreter: Allows in-place execution of scripts, scientific computations and data visualization.
- OCR and document processing: Industry-grade optical character recognition (OCR) for PDFs, spreadsheets and even complex or low-quality images.
- Image generation: Powered by Black Forest Labs’ Flux Ultra, enabling photorealistic content creation.
Undercutting OpenAI and Anthropic on price
Mistral AI is also taking a different approach to pricing compared to competitors.
While OpenAI charges $20 per month for ChatGPT Plus and Anthropic’s Claude has varying pricing based on token limits, Le Chat’s Pro plan starts at $14.99 per month.
Additionally, most features — including the latest models, document uploads and even image generation — are free, with limits only kicking in for power users.
For businesses looking at team-wide adoption, Le Chat Team provides priority support, unified billing and integration credits, while Enterprise deployments allow companies to use their own custom AI models tailored to their organization’s needs.
Quick hands-on comparison
I downloaded and tested Mistral’s Le Chat iOS app on my iPhone briefly while writing and editing this piece, and compared some of my prompts to my default AI assistant, OpenAI’s ChatGPT powered by GPT-4o.
Le Chat was typically noticeably faster in its outputs than ChatGPT, but its Black Forest Labs Ultra model image generation capabilities were surprisingly not as adherent to my prompt as ChatGPT’s built-in connection to OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 image model, which is now 5 months old and hardly state-of-the-art anymore.
Also, OpenAI’s connectivity to web search provided richer diversity of sources than Le Chat, which defaulted to the AFP, a French yet English-language publishing news outlet and wire service that Mistral partnered with back in January 2025.
See some of my comparisons of Le Chat and ChatGPT below.
Le Chat:
ChatGPT:
Le Chat:
ChatGPT:
AI competition continues to intensify
Le Chat’s launch underscores a broader industry shift: While OpenAI and Anthropic remain dominant players, enterprises are actively evaluating alternative AI providers that offer better pricing, more flexible deployment options and clearer data privacy guarantees.
With DeepSeek facing scrutiny over its Chinese data links and OpenAI dealing with ongoing enterprise adoption challenges, Mistral AI’s European positioning, fast performance and competitive pricing could make it an increasingly attractive choice for businesses looking to integrate AI assistants into their workflows.
For companies weighing their AI options, the latest iteration of Le Chat is a signal that viable non-U.S., non-Chinese AI alternatives are beginning to emerge — and it’s clear Mistral AI intends to be at the forefront of that shift.
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