The Fable “blip”—three weeks during which Anthropic’s whizziest artificial-intelligence system was kept from users at the behest of America’s government—is likely to be remembered as an epochal moment in the history of AI. For Arthur Mensch, it was also a nice bit of advertising.

Mr Mensch is the co-founder of Mistral, France’s flagship AI lab and one of the leading European companies in the sector. Like his American peers, he makes large language models; like his Chinese peers, he gives many of them away free; and like both, he spends an awful lot of time thinking about the geopolitical implications of his work.

It is easy to say that Europe needs “sovereign” AI, as Mr Mensch has many times. That is what Mistral, which sells AI services to companies across Europe and beyond, offers: a system that is based fully outside America. But few really grasped the significance of this offer until the American government, at the stroke of a pen, stopped non-Americans from using the world’s best AI system. Now Mistral’s pitch is likely to fall on more receptive ears.

That’s not only good news for Mistral. It also bodes well for the continent at large, dismissed by many as a museum to the past, struggling to keep up with the new world.

I wanted to speak to Mr Mensch to hear his vision for how European AI can survive in an industry in which a few massive, unassailable companies dominate. I also wanted to ask why he thinks the continent isn’t in as bad a place as its critics make out. In the staggeringly short time since his company, now worth well over €10bn ($11.4bn), was founded three years ago, he has become a respected voice on the topic of AI sovereignty, the face of Emmanuel Macron’s tech push and a global standard-bearer for the strengths of France, and Europe, in the sector.

I also wanted to meet him because I’m used to hearing AI experts from America and China dismiss the rest of the world as irrelevant, and I’m not quite sure they are right to do so. If you’re in the business of building God, then there’s nowhere to be but San Francisco or Hangzhou; but if you’re in the business of selling AI, then the competition is fiercer than it looks.

Join me on Tuesday to hear what Mr Mensch had to say. The interview will be available to watch from 6pm London time (1pm in New York). Once you’ve watched it, write to insider@economist.com with your feedback and guest suggestions. See you in the future!