BRADENTON BEACH, Fla. – When Paris Hoisington and her family found a message in a small bottle on the beach last month, it seemed the story had ended with the bottle’s 4,600-mile, eight-year journey.

Following the Trump directive that led Anthropic to pull its latest AI models offline and growing calls for sovereign tech that reduces reliance on the U.S., Mistral AI has been caught in a whirlwind ...