French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu announced €655m in additional AI spending, with the flagship initiative being a single sovereign conversational assistant for roughly one million French civil servants. The chatbot is designed to help with daily administrative tasks and will be built and hosted under French control rather than sourced from US providers. The package also includes a public-health assistant for the state health-insurance agency Ameli, a new public data platform, and funding for computing infrastructure, research, and business support. The €655m is a top-up within France's broader €109bn private AI investment commitment made at last year's Paris summit. Mistral, currently in funding talks at a €20bn valuation, is the most prominent potential beneficiary, though no vendor has been named. The move reflects a wider trend of governments writing AI procurement into spending plans to build domestic AI sectors.
