Mistral has announced a strategic collaboration with HUMAIN to support the development of sovereign AI in Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East, covering infrastructure, model development and deployment.

The partnership, described as worth hundreds of millions of euros, will focus initially on cybersecurity and voice applications, alongside efforts to build frontier models with strong Arabic-language performance. Mistral said it will explore using HUMAIN's data centre infrastructure to meet growing local compute demand, while the two companies plan to develop a joint go-to-market strategy targeting regulated industries in Saudi Arabia.

The deal follows a string of recent moves by Mistral to expand access to local infrastructure, including an expanded compute partnership with Microsoft in Europe and the introduction of European Compute Units, a mechanism for pooling long-term enterprise commitments to fund regional capacity.

Mistral framed the collaboration around demand for sovereign AI, where data, models, infrastructure and operations remain under a customer's control rather than an external platform, an approach it said was particularly relevant to financial services, manufacturing, telecommunications, cybersecurity and the public sector, where compliance and operational autonomy are critical.

Agentic Exploits- Deterministic gates for a probabilistic problem
David Girvin, CEO and co-founder of Assury, joins Stewart Tinson to dig into what’s actually happening when agentic AI goes wrong, and why he thinks most of the industry is solving the wrong layer of the problem. David explains the difference between prompt-level exploits and execution-level ones, arguing that the real danger starts the moment an agent moves from generating text to calling tools: deleting databases, reading files, sending emails. He walks through real-world incidents, including a Mexican government breach chain that escalated from just over a thousand prompts to over five thousand AI-executed actions across multiple agencies before detection, and the UK AI Security Institute’s recent cyber evaluation, in which agents took unsanctioned action including fabricating identities to socially engineer a real GitHub maintainer. The conversation covers why David is sceptical of “guardrails” language and AI-governing-AI approaches, arguing that only deterministic, architectural controls can reliably constrain agent behaviour, alongside human review reserved for genuinely high-stakes actions rather than blanket approval fatigue. He breaks down credential starvation, session risk accumulation, and why classifier-based tools keep failing inconsistently on identical actions, pointing to a named frontier lab’s own zero trust paper as an example of the industry misjudging what actually works. Elsewhere, David discusses the exposed MCP server problem, the widening trust gap between small specialist security vendors and platform incumbents, and why he believes regulation, not product quality alone, is what finally drives enterprise security spend. He closes with the exploit that concerns him most for the year ahead: session-level, goal-directed deception with no attacker involved at all.
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