Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch published an FT opinion piece in March 2026 proposing a 1 to 1.5% revenue levy on all AI providers operating in the EU market1. The levy would apply equally to foreign and domestic companies, funding European cultural creators. In exchange, AI developers would receive legal certainty on training data use, shielding them from copyright liability for training on publicly accessible content.
Mensch framed the proposal as a level playing field mechanism, and the framing is calculated. A flat revenue levy hurts US incumbents with large European revenue bases (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic) more in absolute terms than it hurts Mistral, whose European revenue is smaller. The copyright certainty benefit, conversely, matters more to Mistral: the company trains on European-language data and faces greater legal exposure to EU copyright holders than US competitors whose primary training corpora are English-language.
Whether the proposal gains traction in Brussels depends on the Commission's appetite for a new revenue instrument during a period of transatlantic trade tension. The US administration has already filed a Section 301 investigation naming DMA rules as economic warfare. Adding an AI-specific levy would sharpen that confrontation. The cultural funding element is designed to win support from France's powerful creative industries lobby, which has resisted AI training on copyrighted works without compensation.
