Mistral aims to grow AI consumer base through Mozilla partnership

Mistral said Mozilla would leverage its artificial-intelligence models to power Firefox’s AI assistant, betting on a partnership with a browser provider known for its privacy and data protections to win over more users and expand its consumer base.

The French startup has developed a network of alliances that give it exposure to enterprise customers, big corporations and institutions that can pay for its AI tools at scale and boost revenue.

While those customers have been its primary focus since its early days, joining forces with Mozilla shows that Mistral is ramping up efforts to expand beyond enterprises and put its models directly in the hands of millions of consumers who use Firefox.

Arthur Mensch, Mistral’s co-founder and chief executive, said in an interview that embedding models within Firefox would help drive awareness among users of what is ultimately a consumer product and boost its business down the line because the tokens that AI models use to process information and create responses generate revenue for Mistral.

Under the partnership, Firefox Smart Window—Mozilla’s AI browsing assistant that helps users process complex searches, source information based on their tabs and remember important details they might have clicked away from—will soon be powered by Mistral in the U.S., Canada and France, with the U.K. and Germany expected to follow later this year.

Firefox already allows users to choose between chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini and Mistral’s Vibe—formerly Le Chat—but the partnership means that Mistral will soon become the recommended AI model through Smart Window.

For Mozilla, the arrangement means it can tap Mistral’s multilingual model capabilities to power Smart Window and bring it to more countries. For Mistral, it means the startup will get easy exposure to millions of Firefox users where Smart Window is available.

“Right now, we’re averaging about 200 million users monthly globally, 50+ million daily for desktop 14 million to 16 million for mobile, and I would say the U.S., Germany, France, and the U.K. are the bulk of it,” Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, CEO of Firefox maker Mozilla Corp. said in an interview.

The collaboration brings together two advocates of the open web and open-weight models, which are publicly available for anyone to download and modify. Mozilla Corp., a subsidiary of the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation, has built a reputation as a defender of user privacy through an internet browser that it says blocks trackers automatically and gives users control over how and whether to use AI.

“I don’t think the future of the internet should be one company owning the browser, the model, and the data on the user. That seems like a stark future,” Enzor-DeMeo said.

Mistral, for its part, has been a staunch defender of open-weight models, saying they give users the flexibility to tailor them to their needs while protecting their data.

“We have very strong alignment in terms of promoting an open ecosystem, and the fact that these are going to be open-source models promoted by an open-source product is great and appealing to many users,” Mensch said.

News Corp, owner of Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.