Ecosia CEO Christian Kroll said the company was moving away from Mistral toward open models through a partnership with German AI platform Melious, according to POLITICO’s October 6, 2026, report. But Ecosia’s Help Center, updated October 9, still described the company as using Mistral alongside open-weight models and named Mistral Small 3.2 for AI Overviews.
What Ecosia said about the provider change
POLITICO reported that Kroll described the move as a switch to open models, including Chinese-developed models, through Melious. The models Qwen, GLM and Kimi were among those named in the report. Open-weight models make their trained parameters available for use; that describes how a model can be run or adapted, not where a particular service processes requests.
Ecosia’s Help Center description of its AI features, last updated October 9, says the company uses Mistral and open-weight models side by side, routing different kinds of questions to different models. It identifies AI Overviews as powered by Staan through European Search Perspective (EUSP), using Mistral Small 3.2.
Why Kroll said Ecosia was changing providers
Kroll cited dissatisfaction with Mistral’s model quality and recurring technical problems, including overloaded servers. He also said Ecosia had been too large a customer for Mistral. On cost and performance, Kroll said the Melious partnership had roughly halved Ecosia’s costs while improving quality and performance.
He also questioned whether France’s use of nuclear power aligned with Ecosia’s environmental goals and whether Mistral was genuinely sovereign given its international investors. Those were Kroll’s stated concerns about the provider. At a press conference, Mistral chief scientist and co-founder Guillaume Lample invited Ecosia to try a new Mistral model and offered early access, arguing that building stronger models takes time and that Mistral offers customizable model weights. POLITICO reported both Kroll’s account and Lample’s response.
POLITICO also reported a NewsGuard investigation that found five leading Chinese-backed models repeatedly failed to correct pro-China falsehoods. Rasmus Rothe, executive director of the German AI Association, distinguished overt refusals—which he said can largely be addressed through targeted retraining—from subtle bias embedded in training data, which he said is harder to tackle.
Model origin and request processing are separate
Ecosia says that when it self-hosts open-weight models, they run on its own infrastructure and their original developers cannot access them. The company also says users’ questions and answers stay within that infrastructure rather than being sent to China or other outside regions. That is Ecosia’s general description of its approach to self-hosting and data routing.
How to turn off Ecosia AI on desktop
Ecosia says desktop users can activate AI-free search in Settings. The setting disables AI Overviews, removes AI Chat from navigation and autocomplete, and turns off AI-based auto-routing.
