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Andrea Orcel says the main goal of this week’s offer was to break the stalemate between the two banks

UniCredit UCG 1.04%increase; green up pointing triangle Chief Executive Andrea Orcel said the Italian bank is ready to be more proactive toward Commerzbank CBK 4.57%increase; green up pointing triangle going forward, leaving the door open to revising the terms of its takeover offer if the banks can agree on a common plan.

Earlier this week, UniCredit outlined plans to launch a takeover offer—expected to value Commerzbank as a whole at 34.7 billion euros ($40.05 billion)—aimed at breaking an impasse between the two groups since UniCredit became a shareholder in its German rival in 2024.

Commerzbank said it wasn’t consulted on the offer and reiterated its conviction in its standalone prospects. CEO Bettina Orlopp later said she was surprised by the “low price” of the offer.

Speaking at a Morgan Stanley conference in London on Wednesday, Orcel said the main goal of the offer was to break a stalemate that plagued both banks over the past 18 months by engaging with Commerzbank’s top executives, labor representatives, the German government, shareholders and clients.

“The objective is to open a window of 12 weeks of engagement and dialogue and put all our cards on the table and try to then come out of that engagement with a common vision, a common strategy, a common plan that we can all back, or at minimum reduce the level of misunderstanding and the level of angst that everybody has by misinterpreting each other,” Orcel said. “That is the win-win.”

Commerzbank shares were up 4.5% in European midday trading, while UniCredit’s were up 1.25%

Orcel outlined three possible outcomes of the offer. Under the first one, UniCredit would end up with an unchanged Commerzbank stake—slightly under 30%—or above that level but without reaching control, he said. Orcel said the only change in that scenario would be UniCredit becoming more proactive on sharing its views on the path forward for the German bank.

Under the two other that UniCredit sees as less likely, it would acquire control of Commerzbank or even get close to a point where it could merge with the German bank, Orcel added.

Orcel said UniCredit isn’t considering an offer with a premium at this point, but that it could revise its plans depending on whether it engages with Commerzbank, and what that process leads to.

While the settlement of the offer isn’t due to be completed until next year, Orcel said UniCredit expects to know the outcome in June.

Most enterprise AI projects fail not because companies lack the technology, but because the models they’re using don’t understand their business. The models are often trained on the internet, rather than decades of internal documents, workflows, and institutional knowledge.

That gap is where Mistral, the French AI startup, sees opportunity. On Tuesday, the company announced Mistral Forge, a platform that lets enterprises build custom models trained on their own data. Mistral announced the platform at Nvidia GTC, Nvidia’s annual technology conference, which this year is focused heavily on AI and agentic models for enterprise.

It’s a pointed move for Mistral, a company that has built its business on corporate clients while rivals OpenAI and Anthropic have soared ahead in terms of consumer adoption. CEO Arthur Mensch says Mistral’s laser focus on the enterprise is working: The company is on track to surpass $1 billion in annual recurring revenue this year.

A big part of doubling down on enterprise is giving companies more control over their data and their AI systems, Mistral says.

“What Forge does is it lets enterprises and governments customize AI models for their specific needs,” Elisa Salamanca, Mistral’s head of product, told TechCrunch.

Several companies in the enterprise AI space already claim to offer similar capabilities, but most focus on fine-tuning existing models or layering proprietary data on top through techniques like retrieval augmented generation (RAG). These approaches don’t fundamentally retrain models; instead, they adapt or query them at runtime using company data.

Mistral, by contrast, says it is enabling companies to train models from scratch. In theory, this could address some of the limitations of more common approaches — for example, better handling of non-English or highly domain-specific data, and greater control over model behavior. It could also allow companies to train agentic systems using reinforcement learning and reduce reliance on third-party model providers, avoiding risks like model changes or deprecation.

Forge customers can build their custom models using Mistral’s wide library of open-weight AI models, which includes small models such as the recently introduced Mistral Small 4. According to Mistral co-founder and chief technologist, Timothée Lacroix, Forge can help unlock more value out of its existing models.

“The trade-offs that we make when we build smaller models is that they just cannot be as good on every topic as their larger counterparts, and so the ability to customize them lets us pick what we emphasize and what we drop,” Lacroix said.

Mistral advises on which models and infrastructure to use, but both decisions stay with the customer, Lacroix said. And for teams that need more than guidance, Forge comes with Mistral’s team of forward-deployed engineers who embed directly with customers to surface the right data and adapt to their needs — a model borrowed from the likes of IBM and Palantir.

“As a product, Forge already comes with all the tooling and infrastructure so you can generate synthetic data pipelines,” Salamanca said. “But understanding how to build the right evals and making sure that you have the right amount of data is something that enterprises usually don’t have the right expertise for, and that’s what the FDEs bring to the table.”

Mistral has already made Forge available to partners, including Ericsson, the European Space Agency, Italian consulting company Reply, and Singapore’s DSO and HTX. Early adopters also include ASML, the Dutch chipmaker that led Mistral’s Series C round last September at a €11.7 billion valuation (approximately $13.8 billion at the time).

These partnerships are emblematic of what Mistral expects Forge’s main use cases to be. According to Mistral’s chief revenue officer Marjorie Janiewicz, these include governments who need to tailor models for their language and culture; financial players with high compliance requirements; manufacturers with customization needs; and tech companies that need to tune models to their code base.

Arizona attorney general Kris Mayes has filed criminal charges against prediction market platform Kalshi for allegedly operating an illegal gambling business in the state without a license and for election wagering.

The 20-count complaint, filed in Maricopa County court on Tuesday, accuses the company of engaging in unlicensed gambling activities, claiming that the site “accepted bets from Arizona residents on a wide range of events,” including state elections, a practice that is illegal in Arizona. The complaint charged Kalshi with four counts of election wagering for accepting bets from Arizona residents on the 2028 presidential race, the 2026 Arizona gubernatorial race, the 2026 Arizona Republican gubernatorial primary, and the 2026 Arizona secretary of state race.

This is the first time a state has pursued such charges against the company, according to the AZ Mirror, and marks a significant escalation in the battle between states and the prediction market industry.

“Kalshi may brand itself as a ‘prediction market,’ but what it’s actually doing is running an illegal gambling operation and taking bets on Arizona elections, both of which violate Arizona law,” Attorney General Mayes said in a statement. “No company gets to decide for itself which laws to follow.”

It’s worth noting that the charges are technically misdemeanors. They follow a small surge of cease-and-desist letters, lawsuits, and other official actions from states over Kalshi’s activities, in which numerous officials have complained that the company is skirting state gambling laws.

Conversely, prediction sites like Kalshi have argued that they are not in violation of state law because they are subject to federal regulation via the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Kalshi may be getting attacked left, right, and center, but the company has also taken its own, often preemptive, legal action.

Kalshi sued Arizona’s Department of Gaming in federal court on March 12. The company’s lawsuit argued that Arizona’s regulatory attempts were intruding “into the federal government’s exclusive authority to regulate derivatives trading on exchanges.” Kalshi also recently sued Iowa and Utah on similar grounds.

Mayes’ office argues the company is merely trying to avoid accountability.

“Kalshi is making a habit of suing states rather than following their laws. In the last three weeks alone, the company has filed lawsuits against Iowa and Utah, and now Arizona,” Mayes said in a statement. “Rather than work within the legal frameworks that states like Arizona have established, Kalshi is running to federal court to try to avoid accountability.”

Elisabeth Diana, Kalshi’s head of communications, called the Arizona criminal charges “seriously flawed” and a matter of “gamesmanship” related to the company’s own litigation against the state.

“Four days after Kalshi filed suit in federal court, these charges were filed to circumvent federal court and short-circuit the normal judicial process,” Diana said. “They attempt to prevent federal courts from evaluating the case based on the merits — whether Kalshi is subject to exclusive federal jurisdiction. These charges are meritless, and we look forward to fighting them in court.”

Federal officials have signaled that they’re on the prediction industry’s side, setting up a potential regulatory showdown between states and the federal bureaucracy. Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, recently published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he accused state governments of having “waged legal attacks on the CFTC’s authority to regulate” such sites. Selig also claimed that his agency would no longer “sit idly by while overzealous state governments” undermined the agency’s “exclusive jurisdiction” over the industry.

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