A tale of two narratives
OpenAI just acquired TBPN, the daily streaming show focused on Silicon Valley (if you’re not familiar with TBPN, the New York Times wrote a good profile a few months ago). This is insane news for both the tech industry and the media industry.
When you think the story cannot become crazier, the Financial Times says they spent “low hundreds of millions” on this deal. It’s a tech level valuation for a media company. Insane stuff.
But it made me think about the current narratives at big AI companies. A few years ago, an executive at Mistral told me that the French AI lab wanted to position itself as the anti-OpenAI: open instead of closed, colorful branding instead of black-and-white branding, developer-centric instead of consumer-centric.
Mistral’s first breakthrough success was the Mistral 7B: a small, open-weight model that you could literally download and run on your laptop. By comparison, OpenAI had just released GPT-4 and didn’t say much in its technical report — we don’t even know how many parameters were needed to train the model.
Flash forward to 2026 and a funny thing is happening. Not only is each company’s narrative shifting, but in many cases they’re even swapping their narratives. Last week, Mistral co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch wrote an opinion piece in the Financial Times saying that big AI companies should pay a tax to content publishers in order to freely reuse content as training material.
This is a complete 180 compared to Mistral’s positioning around the EU’s AI Act. At the time, they lobbied hard to protect big AI companies from extreme regulation. The funny thing is that the AI Act has reached a dead end. The application date has been postponed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they postpone it again and again until it disappears completely.
Now, Mistral gets to suggest what EU regulation should look like and this Financial Times piece is super smart:
- It makes them look like a responsible, friendly company with the broader economy.
- It’s a pitch on European sovereignty, their new (greenfield) strategy as it is becoming increasingly hard to compete on the global AI stage.
- It’s a tax on revenue, and Mistral’s ARR ($400 million) is much smaller than OpenAI’s ($25 billion) and Anthropic’s ($19 billion). So OpenAI and Anthropic would pay 50x to 60x more than Mistral to fund European companies (Mistral’s potential customers).
- And of course, it brings legal certainty and protection from liability.
So let me recap. Mistral, the scrappy, developer-friendly European AI company, goes to the Financial Times to send a message to EU leaders through a prestigious old-media institution. At the same time, OpenAI is buying TBPN, an echo chamber for Silicon Valley, to shape the conversation more directly.
In 2023, Sam Altman went on a world tour and met Emmanuel Macron, Rishi Sunak, Narendra Modi, Pedro Sánchez and other world leaders , acting almost like a head of state himself. In 2026, Arthur Mensch is starting to play a similar game. The tables have turned.
Have a good day ☀️
Romain