French government announces €655m AI investment for public services

The French government has announced it will invest €655 million to deploy AI technology across public services, healthcare and government departments.

In a video posted on social media platform X, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu compared the impact of AI to transformative technologies such as electricity and the internet.

“The question is no longer whether the government will use artificial intelligence, but how quickly it will transform public services,” he said.

As part of the programme, all French civil servants will gain access to a sovereign AI chatbot developed and hosted in France. Lecornu said the move is designed to reduce reliance on foreign technology providers and ensure sensitive state data remains under national control.

“State data is our wealth and must remain protected,” Lecornu said, describing digital sovereignty as “non-negotiable”.

The government will also expand the use of AI technologies originally developed by the Ministry of the Armed Forces. These tools, designed to process sensitive information, will initially be deployed within the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of the Interior before being rolled out more widely across government.

France is planning to introduce a public healthcare AI assistant on the country’s Ameli health platform by the end of the year. The assistant will help citizens obtain an initial assessment of their symptoms, navigate healthcare services and access information more quickly.

According to Lecornu, the technology will allow citizens to use AI services managed by France’s national health insurance system rather than relying on commercial platforms operated by international technology companies.

The government is also preparing to launch a new AI-focused public data platform designed to make demographic, economic, geographic and administrative datasets more accessible to researchers, entrepreneurs, local authorities and public sector organisations.

Over the past two years, Lecornu said individual ministries have developed and tested their own AI tools, with many civil servants now using the technology in their daily work.

Lecornu said these early deployments had demonstrated tangible benefits, including reduced administrative workloads, improved productivity, and faster processing of routine tasks.

David Weinstein, co-founder and chief executive at platform provider KayOS, said a French-built LLM can be designed to serve national priorities and optimised for the nuances of the French language.

“What makes this approach particularly powerful is that these systems can compound in intelligence over time,” he added. “As they absorb domain-specific knowledge – whether that’s medical terminology, public health data, or sector-specific workflows – they become more capable in those exact areas.

Weinstein said that France’s approach is very different from adapting a one-size-fits-all

model.

“Forward-thinking organisations are recognising that owning their agentic infrastructure gives them sovereignty over their AI processes,” he continued. “France is applying that same logic at a national scale, which positions it to build AI systems that genuinely reflect its values and serve its citizens effectively.”