Mistral AI, the French artificial intelligence company that has positioned itself as Europe’s leading challenger to American AI giants, announced on Tuesday the general availability of Mistral Vibe 2.0, a significant upgrade to its terminal-based coding agent that’s the startup’s most aggressive push yet into the competitive AI-assisted software development market.The release is a pivotal moment for the Paris-based company, which is transitioning its developer tools from a free testing phase to a commercial product integrated with its paid subscription plans. The move comes just days after Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch told Bloomberg Television at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the company expects to cross €1 billion in revenue by the end of 2026 — a projection that would still leave it far behind American competitors but would cement its position as Europe’s preeminent AI firm.”The announcement is more of an upgrade and general availability,” Timothée Lacroix, cofounder of Mistral, said in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “We produced Devstral 2 in December, and we released at the time a first version of Vibe. Everything was free and in testing. Now we have finalized and improved the CLI, and we are moving Mistral Vibe to a paid plan that’s bundled with our Le Chat plans.”Why legacy enterprise code is AI’s blind spotMistral Vibe 2.0 arrives as technology executives across industries grapple with a fundamental tension: the promise of AI-powered coding tools is immense, but the most capable models are controlled by a handful of American companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google — whose closed-source approaches leave enterprises with limited control over their most sensitive intellectual property.Mistral is betting that its open-source approach, combined with deep customization capabilities, will appeal to organizations wary of sending proprietary code to third-party providers. The st …
