Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT, Mistral AI and Google Gemini : which AI for which use ?
· 4 min read · by Adrien Lopez
A practical overview of the four major AI assistant families: Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT, Mistral AI and Google Gemini. Strengths, coding tools, privacy, open-weight models and European sovereignty, to help entrepreneurs and developers choose the right AI technology.
Large language models (LLMs) have become everyday tools for writing, coding, research and customer support. Four families dominate the conversation: Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT, Mistral AI and Google Gemini. They are all excellent, and they improve every few months, so instead of a benchmark that would be outdated next quarter, here is a guide to their philosophy, ecosystem and best uses.
Anthropic Claude
Anthropic was founded in 2021 in San Francisco by former OpenAI researchers, including Dario and Daniela Amodei, with a strong focus on AI safety. Its models, named Claude, are trained with techniques such as Constitutional AI, where the model follows an explicit set of principles.
Strengths:
- Writing and reasoning: nuanced, well-structured long-form text, analysis of long documents.
- Coding and agents: Claude is widely used by developers, notably through Claude Code, an agentic coding tool that works in the terminal, IDEs and the browser, reads a codebase, edits files, runs tests and opens pull requests. This very website was migrated to Next.js with its help.
- Open standards: Anthropic created the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open protocol now adopted across the industry to connect AI assistants to tools and data.
- Available on claude.ai, through the API, and via cloud providers (AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, Microsoft Foundry).
OpenAI ChatGPT
OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022 and triggered the generative AI wave. It remains the most widely used AI assistant in the world.
Strengths:
- Versatility and ecosystem: chat, voice mode, image generation, web search, file analysis, custom GPTs, and agent features.
- Multimodality: text, images, audio and video in a single interface.
- Developer platform: a rich API, and Codex for coding tasks.
- Strong integration with Microsoft products (Copilot), thanks to its partnership with Microsoft.
Mistral AI
Mistral AI was founded in Paris in 2023 by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix, alumni of Google DeepMind and Meta. It quickly became the European champion of generative AI.
Strengths:
- Open-weight models: Mistral publishes many of its models under the permissive Apache 2.0 licence, so they can be downloaded, fine-tuned and run on your own infrastructure.
- European sovereignty: a European company, with hosting options in Europe, and on-premise deployments for companies and governments.
- Efficiency: excellent performance for their size, making them cost-effective in production.
- Le Chat, its assistant for the general public and businesses, and specialised models for code, OCR and reasoning.
Google Gemini
Gemini is developed by Google DeepMind and succeeded Bard in 2023-2024.
Strengths:
- Very long context and multimodality: Gemini handles large documents, videos and audio natively.
- Integration with Google: Search, Gmail, Docs, Android and Chrome.
- Developer tools: Google AI Studio, Vertex AI, and the Gemma family of open models.
Comparison at a glance
| Claude | ChatGPT | Mistral AI | Gemini | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Company | Anthropic (US) | OpenAI (US) | Mistral AI (France) | Google DeepMind (US/UK) |
| Best known for | Writing, coding, agents, safety | Versatility, consumer adoption | Open weights, sovereignty, efficiency | Multimodality, Google integration |
| Open models | No | Some open-weight releases | Yes, many under Apache 2.0 | Gemma family |
| Coding tool | Claude Code | Codex | Mistral Code / Devstral | Gemini CLI / Code Assist |
| EU sovereignty | Enterprise data residency options | Enterprise data residency options | Native | Enterprise data residency options |
The AI landscape changes fast: check each provider's latest models and terms before choosing.
How to choose
- For writing, analysis and software development, Claude and ChatGPT are the most popular choices; many developers use both.
- For confidential data or public services in Europe, consider Mistral AI or self-hosted open-weight models, see our guide on sovereign cloud and the CLOUD Act.
- If your company lives in Google Workspace, Gemini will be the smoothest experience.
- For products, design your architecture to be model-agnostic: use open standards like MCP, keep your prompts and evaluations in Git, and be able to switch provider.
Open source and AI
Open-weight models (Mistral, Llama, Gemma, Qwen, DeepSeek and others) and open source tools such as Ollama, vLLM, llama.cpp and Hugging Face make it possible to run capable AI on your own hardware. It is the same story as Linux versus proprietary Unix: open ecosystems foster competition, transparency and sovereignty. Tools like Nextcloud Assistant already integrate these local models in everyday collaboration.
Making your website visible to AI assistants
AI assistants increasingly answer questions by searching and citing websites. To be understood and quoted:
- publish clear, well-structured content with explicit headings and facts;
- allow AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot...) in your
robots.txtif you want to be cited; - provide a
sitemap.xml, structured data (JSON-LD) and anllms.txtfile summarising your site; - keep pages fast and accessible: what is good for humans is good for machines.
This site follows those principles, built with React and Next.js.
Resources
Want to integrate AI into your product or workflow? Contact AD Ventures.