The conversation about AI is dominated by American names: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. It is easy to conclude that Europe only shows up in this story as the place that writes the rules. That is not the whole picture. There is a real European AI industry — smaller than the American giants, but shipping products people use every day. Here are the companies worth knowing, and what each is actually good at.
This post is part of a series on moving off American software; here we stay in the AI lane.
The chatbots you can use today
- Mistral AI (France) — the most prominent European AI lab. Its assistant, renamed Mistral Vibe in 2026 (previously Le Chat), combines a conversational assistant with a coding agent: it can search the web, read connected documents and spreadsheets, pull context from tools like email, calendars and GitHub, and write, test and open changes across a codebase. It also takes voice input and generates images.
- Lumo by Proton (Switzerland) — a privacy-first assistant from the Proton Mail company. Chats are protected with zero-access encryption under a no-logs policy, and you can delete your data at any time.
- Euria by Infomaniak (Switzerland) — built by the Geneva cloud company, running on the open-source Qwen3 model and processed exclusively on Infomaniak's own infrastructure in Switzerland. It answers questions, drafts text, summarizes documents and analyzes images, and Infomaniak states conversations are not used to train models.
- GreenPT (Netherlands) — a Utrecht-based assistant that cites its web sources, offers an OpenAI-compatible API and a no-code chatbot builder, and serves inference from Scaleway infrastructure in France.
- CamoCopy (Luxembourg) — a chatbot with integrated web search that returns source links, plus document and image analysis.
Translation: the strongest European claim
DeepL (Germany) is not a curiosity — for many language pairs it genuinely outperforms Google Translate, and it became the default translation tool for a large share of European businesses precisely because of that quality gap. Alongside it, Reverso (France) pairs translation with grammar checking and conjugation tools, and ModernMT (Italy) adapts to the context of a whole document and improves from corrections.
If you type and want an assistant rather than a translator, DeepL's write-and-translate flow covers a lot of what people actually use ChatGPT for.
Enterprise AI
Aleph Alpha (Germany) builds AI for enterprises and public institutions, focusing on the regulated-market segment where data handling and explainability matter more than chatbot flair. Mistral also sells its models to companies through APIs and enterprise deployments, not just through its consumer assistant.
And there is quieter infrastructure work: Qwant and Ecosia jointly operate Staan, a European search index, and use it to reduce their reliance on American search technology.
Why location matters more for AI than most software
With most SaaS, the data that leaves you is whatever you store. With AI assistants, everything you type is the input — and chat logs are frequently retained for abuse monitoring or training unless the provider states otherwise. Where the provider sits determines whose laws those logs answer to. The European products here lean into that: Lumo encrypts chats so even Proton cannot read them; Euria keeps inference on its own Swiss hardware and says conversations never train models.
The honest gaps
- None of these companies can match the frontier labs' spending power, and the very largest models still come from the US and China.
- Some European products run open models trained elsewhere — Euria, for instance, runs Qwen3, which was not built in Europe. Using a European host is not the same as using a European model.
- The consumer ecosystems are younger: fewer integrations, smaller communities, and feature sets that trail the American assistants in places.
None of this makes them bad choices. It makes them choices to test with your own tasks, like any other tool.
Related
Part of a series on European alternatives to American software:
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