Mistral spent two years warning the US could switch off its rivals. A fat-cat meme just made the point for it.

On Wednesday, Arthur Mensch took his seat at a G7 working lunch in Evian alongside Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Dario Amodei. Days earlier, the US government had ordered Amodei’s company to cut foreign nationals off from its most capable models, and Anthropic had pulled them worldwide.

For the one European founder at the table, the timing could hardly have been better.

Mensch, the chief executive of Mistral, has spent two years warning that this exact thing could happen. Now it has, and the internet has turned his argument into a joke about a very large cat.

The joke is ‘Le Chaton Fat’, a fictional Mistral ‘frontier model’ that tech circles cannot stop posting about. It does not exist. As the French outlet Numerama confirmed, it is an elaborate running gag that started on Mistral’s subreddit after the company rebranded its Le Chat chatbot as Vibe, a name change users hated.

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From there it spiralled: fake benchmark charts showing the cat crushing OpenAI and Anthropic, a mock EU notice barring it for being ‘too heavy to regulate’, and a stated spec of ‘1000 meows per second’ and ‘maximum chonk’. Wharton’s Ethan Mollick joked he expected to be asked about ‘Mistral’s new ginormous cat model’ by corporate clients.

Replit’s Amjad Masad chimed in. Mensch himself replied: ‘It’s actually le gros chaton.’

It is silly, and it is also revealing. The meme caught precisely because it dressed up a real sentiment: that with American models suddenly switchable-off, a European alternative that nobody can revoke is the punchline everyone reached for.

Mensch made that case long before it was funny. At London Tech Week in 2025, he warned about US firms ‘having the keys’ to their models. ‘At some point, you need to be able to turn it off or turn it on, and you don’t want to leave it to another country,’ he said.

Last month, at France’s National Assembly, he gave Europe ‘two years’ to build its own AI before becoming permanently dependent.

The Anthropic shutdown turned that abstraction into a live demonstration. Mistral’s pitch, open-weight models that customers can run on their own infrastructure and that no foreign government can switch off, stopped being a talking point and became a procurement argument.

Mensch sharpened it himself this week. Mistral exists, he wrote on LinkedIn, to keep AI ‘outside of centralized control exercised by states or corporations’, framing the stakes in the language of the last century’s defining resource: ‘AI, just like oil in