€655 million for AI: France’s power play at VivaTech turns into a geopolitical tangle

Coinciding with the official opening of the VivaTech show in Paris this Wednesday, June 17, 2026, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu officially announced yesterday a massive acceleration of the state’s digital strategy. The government will inject an additional 655 million euros into the development of artificial intelligence through the France 2030 program.The objective is clear: to build genuine technological autonomy “so as not to depend on the goodwill of certain partners”. This announcement comes just days after Washington ordered the American startup Anthropic to block foreign nationals’ access to its Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, causing a shockwave within the French political class.

Like electricity yesterday, like the Internet thirty years ago, artificial intelligence is already changing our lives.

The time for experimentation is over. I have decided to accelerate the transformation of the state:

→ a sovereign conversational assistant for all civil servants… pic.twitter.com/bAMDPEKqVh

— Sébastien Lecornu (@SebLecornu) June 16, 2026

A Mistral AI chatbot for one million civil servants

The most concrete pillar of this software push is the widespread deployment of a shared sovereign conversational assistant designed to support state civil servants. After a ten-month testing phase involving 10,000 civil servants in the Interior, Justice, and Bercy ministries, the tool will be deployed on a large scale to provide around one million employees connected to the interministerial network with it. For a highly controlled development cost of €700,000, this chatbot will rely directly on the models developed by French startup Mistral AI.The objective is twofold: to automate the handling of routine administrative files (such as the management of judicial proceedings or calls for proposals for researchers) and to put a stop to the clandestine use of unsecured American AI tools within public administrations.

To ensure that this transition does not remain a pie-in-the-sky ambition, Sébastien Lecornu warned that the adoption of AI will now have a direct impact on budget trade-offs: each ministry will have to demonstrate that it is using these technologies to streamline administrative procedures and make savings. Starting this month, the rollout will include the “Diplo IA” translation tool developed by the Quai d’Orsay, while a “public health assistant” will be integrated into the Ameli platform of the Health Insurance agency by the end of the year to ensure that French citizens’ health data is not entrusted to foreign laboratories.

The Palantir affair: the inside story of a drawn-out “disconnection”

To give concrete expression to this sovereign shift, the Prime Minister also announced a strong political gesture: the upcoming replacement of the American giant Palantir with the French company ChapsVision to manage the processing of data from the Directorate-General for Internal Security (DGSI).Sébastien Lecornu justified this ouster by emphasizing that France could no longer tolerate “strategic dependencies in the digital sector,” while Palantir is facing major international controversies over the use of its military targeting tools by the United States and Israel.

Millions to strengthen French supercomputers

Beyond consumer-facing applications and this geopolitical saga, the remainder of the €655 million envelope will be directed toward the material and industrial foundations of the French ecosystem. The state plans to heavily subsidize academic research, industrial sectors undergoing transition, but above all physical infrastructure and raw computing capacity.

To compete with the infrastructure of American giants, France absolutely must have its own supercomputers on its soil. This is the whole issue at stake in the current tenders for the construction of future European data gigafactories, where French companies are jostling to secure strategic sites. By positioning itself as a guaranteed buyer of colossal size for local startups, the state hopes to create the necessary momentum to sustain the AI industry in Europe.

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