Albert API — France's sovereign generative-AI platform for civil servants

France's Directorate for Digital Affairs (DINUM) launched Albert in April 2024 as the French state's sovereign generative large language model. Built on open-source foundations — Meta's Llama 3.1 and Mistral AI models — Albert's codebase is published on GitHub and Hugging Face; its inference endpoint runs on French SecNumCloud-certified infrastructure, ensuring that sensitive administrative data never leaves French jurisdiction. A first pilot at roughly 60 France Services counters found 71% of advisors considered the tool easy to use and 58% would recommend it to colleagues; Albert drew on a corpus of 43,000 Q&A sheets from service-public.fr to answer citizen queries.

The Albert API was subsequently opened to all French ministries as an interministerial AI inference platform, targeting the 2.5 million-strong French civil service. Specific production deployments include: drafting responses to an estimated 16 million annual citizen requests at the tax administration (DGFIP); summarising around 4,000 environmental project dossiers per year at regional DREAL agencies; and supporting court-hearing management at the Ministry of Justice. From October 2025, 10,000 agents from eight ministries enrolled in an eight-month test of the enhanced 'Assistant IA' version co-developed with Mistral AI. Plans for full generalisation were suspended after technical malfunctions and erroneous responses were identified; a comprehensive assessment is expected in summer 2026. The programme illustrates both the potential and the governance challenges of deploying sovereign generative AI at scale across a large public administration.

Read the full analysis: https://www.numerique.gouv.fr/offre-accompagnement/expertise-albert-ia-etat/