In a single week, three capitals placed three very different bets on who controls AI. At Bercy, the French government unveiled a "systemic" sovereignty plan: its domestic intelligence service (DGSI) is terminating its contract with US data-analytics giant Palantir in favor of French firm Chapsvision, and a conversational assistant built on Mistral AI is being rolled out to roughly one million civil servants, backed by €655M of new investment through 2030. The most useful number for any executive: a survey found more than half of state agents were already using unsanctioned outside tools like ChatGPT — the universal shadow-AI lesson is that if you don't give people a sanctioned tool, they will use one you cannot see, with your data along for the ride.

On the same day, Alibaba launched Qwen-Robot, its first suite of "embodied" AI models — a  ...