Their target market is completely different. Anthropic and OpenAI try to build general AI that wins on all the benchmarks by throwing ungodly amounts of money at it.
Mistral focuses on long term b2b contracts and their proposition is that they fine tune their model to your needs with an added bonus of 'not dependent on America' in a politically tumultuous time.
Another added bonus is that they offer a clear "self hosted" if you want it, you can get the exact same product without sending your queries to them, it's costlier and you need the hardware sure, but between the economic espionnage aspect, the sovereignty aspect, the data safety aspect ... This has teeth in europe.
An so like if a business wanted to home in on one very specific use case that could be hyper optimized by SFT, had really good support for updating and adding new features, on-Prem etc. that’s the kind of market they are in?