Search Engine Ecosia Swaps Mistral for Chinese A.I.

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Europe’s push for A.I. sovereignty has a problem, and it comes from Berlin: Ecosia, the search engine that is also used by public authorities, has dropped Mistral as its A.I. supplier and is turning to open models instead, including Chinese ones such as Alibaba’s Qwen, Z.ai’s GLM and Moonshot AI’s Kimi. That is according to Politico. The timing is awkward for Mistral, which unveiled Large 4, its most powerful model yet, this very week. Even that model falls short of the best Chinese open-weight models.

Disappointed by the Quality

Ecosia switched from OpenAI to Mistral only in May, as a statement of European independence. According to Ecosia’s help page, A.I. summaries in search most recently ran on Mistral Small 3.2 and the A.I. chat on Mistral Small 4. Now comes the reversal: Christian Kroll, Ecosia’s chief executive, is disappointed with the quality of Mistral’s models, which he says lag about a year behind the competition, Politico reports. According to reports, Mistral’s servers were also frequently overloaded. Mr. Kroll also questions Mistral’s status as a sovereign provider, because the French company depends on money from international investors.

Ecosia now gets its models through Melious, a German platform that runs open A.I. models on servers in eight E.U. countries. According to Melious, data never leaves Europe, and its lineup includes Z.ai’s GLM 5.3, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. Reports on the switch say it roughly halved the cost of Ecosia’s A.I. services while improving performance.

Mistral Strikes Back With Large 4

This week, Mistral introduced Large 4, a model with one trillion parameters trained in European data centers, with open weights due at the end of October. The leap over its predecessors is huge: Large 4 scores 38.4 points on the Intelligence Index from Artificial Analysis, compared with 14 points for Medium 3.5 and just 9 for Large 3. That makes it the strongest open model outside China.

It still falls short of the Chinese leaders, though. In the ranking of open models, Large 4 comes in eighth, and all seven models ahead of it are from China:

Price is no clear win for Mistral either. At $1.13 (about €1) per task in the index, Large 4 is cheaper than GLM-5.3 and Kimi K3 at around $2 each, but DeepSeek V4.1 Flash scores slightly higher for just $0.27 (about 24 cents). Because Mistral is still training the preview version, Large 4 could improve before the weights are released.

The Sovereignty Paradox

The case highlights a dilemma for European A.I. policy. Anyone in Europe who wants top-tier open models currently ends up almost inevitably with Chinese developers, even if those models run on European servers. Mistral itself is betting on Chinese models: Since the summer, the company has been remaking itself into a European neocloud that sells computing capacity, model hosting and regional data control as a package. For the first time, models from other developers run on its platform, and the first one was, of all things, Z.ai’s GLM 5.2. Mistral has since moved to the successor, GLM 5.3, and its model overview lists no other third-party models so far. In other words, Mistral offers its customers the very Chinese A.I. that Ecosia has now switched to. Z.ai has been on the U.S. entity list since 2025.

Mistral is pushing back. Large 4 beats the Chinese models in some areas, Arthur Mensch, Mistral’s chief executive, told Reuters, pointing to its cyber defense capabilities, among other things. The company also stresses that Large 4 was trained entirely in Europe and that customers can run the weights on their own servers.