ANNEX TO AI GUIDELINES AI Models and Systems

We have been working with our standard LLM provider, Mistral AI SAS, since 2024. Mistral AI develops various models for general-purpose queries (Mistral Vibe, also known as LeChat), as well as specialized models for software development (Devstral) and expert models (Mixtral). Mistral AI is headquartered in France and trains its models in France or Sweden, which significantly reduces their carbon footprint. Although U.S. companies (primarily Microsoft) have invested in Mistral AI, a takeover is unlikely, as compliance with EU regulations is the model provider’s stated USP. Mistral AI has not yet published any information regarding the working conditions of data workers. In addition to using it for chatbot subscriptions, we primarily use the smaller Open Rates models—which are comparatively very powerful—for energy-efficient text and image analysis tasks.

In addition, since 2025 we have been using models from Anthropic PBC, a (so far) public-benfit company based in the U.S., in all cases where the quality of the knowledge base and language analysis are more important than carbon footprint, digital sovereignty, and usage costs. In addition to the high quality of its Frontier models, Anthropic’s USP lies in its ethical standards regarding how AI is used. Less relevant and transparent is the question of how AI is operated. It is known that Anthropic does not operate its own data centers but instead uses cloud services from Google and Amazon/AWS for this purpose. These offset their emissions by 100% (Google) and 90% (AWS), respectively, through climate protection projects. The Frontier model Claude is one of the largest in terms of parameter size; according to the company, it is comparatively energy-efficient in operation due to the Mixture of Experts approach. Anthropic provides no information regarding the working conditions of data workers.