RAISE Summit hit by power outage during keynote with Mozilla president and Mistral CEO

This article was published on July 8, 2026 A RAISE Summit keynote with Mozilla's president and Mistral's CEO was making the case for open-source AI's reliability. Then the venue lost power, and the two finished almost in the dark. Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch and Mozilla president Mark Surman were making the case for open-source AI’s reliability at RAISE Summit. Then the venue lost power, and their fireside chat finished almost in the dark. It was, in fairness, the perfect cue. Midway through a RAISE Summit fireside chat on open-source AI, the Master Stage lost power. The microphones died. Arthur Mensch and Mark Surman carried on, almost in the dark. The topic, of all things, was reliability. Mensch, the Mistral chief, was arguing that open models let you own your AI, fork it, and never sit at a vendor’s mercy. Surman, Mozilla’s president, had just said open source is something “they can’t shut the lights off” on. Then the lights went off. Strip the comedy and the chat had a serious case. Open-source models are becoming the default building blocks of AI, the pair argued, the way Linux and the web became defaults before them. Mensch’s line is blunt: closed models hand a few providers i