Le Chat becomes Vibe: Mistral goes all in on AI agents

Launched in February 2024, Le Chat had made its mark in the French artificial intelligence landscape, even coming to Free Mobile subscribers free of charge. On May 28, at its AI NOW summit, Mistral announced that it was renaming the assistant Vibe. The company’s name itself does not change, but the assistant gains two far more ambitious roles in the process than mere conversation.

From the chatty assistant to the do-it-all machine

Under the name Vibe, Mistral now brings together three products. The first retains the classic chat experience of the former Chat. Vibe Work serves as an office assistant, capable of connecting to Google Workspace, Outlook, Slack, GitHub, or Notion to perform tasks on your behalf. Vibe Code, finally, targets developers with an agent that writes and fixes code, both on the command line and in the Visual Studio Code editor.

The transition is smooth for users: the same address, the same username, with accounts and histories transferred automatically. As for pricing, the free plan remains, the Pro subscription is around €18 per month, and the Team plan rises to around €30 per user. Everything is powered by a new in-house model, Mistral Medium 3.5.

This shift is not an isolated one. By redirecting its chatbot toward agents, Mistral is following in the footsteps of the entire competition: OpenAI is promoting its coding agent Codex, while Anthropic is rolling out its Claude AI in desktop and coding versions. The name “Vibe” itself did not come out of nowhere, as it already referred to the company’s coding tool (and, more broadly, to the practice of vibecoding). Mistral has simply extended the label to the entire range.

Why give up a French name that was working?

The wordplay was clever, though: “Le Chat,” both the animal and the chatbot—a distinctly French wink. But a French name quickly becomes a liability when you want to sell your AI from New York to Singapore. “Vibe,” an all-purpose English word, travels without accents. There is nothing sentimental about Mistral’s calculations: since September 2025, Dutch company ASML has injected €1.3 billion into the business to become its largest shareholder, propelling its valuation to €11.7 billion—a European record.

Such a windfall comes with an obligation: to grow, and fast. At the end of 2025, Mistral claimed annualized revenue of more than $400 million, twenty times lower than a year earlier. Impressive figures, but still modest compared with the tens of billions targeted by OpenAI or Anthropic. Hence the pivot toward businesses and agents, where the money is, rather than the general public and its free conversations.

Yet Mistral positions itself as a champion of “sovereign AI”, and its CEO, Arthur Mensch, regularly warns that Europe risks becoming a “vassal state” of the United States. Trading the most French identity in its lineup for an English-language label therefore has a slightly bitter taste. For the roughly fifteen million Free subscribers who moved to Vibe without being asked, daily life hardly changes (same app, same AI). But the symbol speaks volumes about the pressure weighing on European startups, which are expected to play in the big leagues.

Chat is dead, long live Vibe: it remains to be seen whether the assistant that wanted to woo France will be able to win over the rest of the world, now that it has traded its feline whiskers for an agent’s outfit.

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Source: Mistral