“Everything that is excessive is insignificant,” said Talleyrand. As often, we were walking around the network this Wednesday to take the pulse of the news when a FLASH from AlertsInfos stopped us in our tracks: France “started experimenting” with artificial intelligence software that would comb social networks, cameras and court files to anticipate riots.
More than 389,000 views, three days after the looting of October 17 and four days before “Act II”. Excessive and therefore insignificant? We traced the trail to the targeted software. Verdict: this AI does exist but it is twelve years old and it is not what you think.
The FLASH on anti-riot AI comes from a BFM column
The source included in parentheses of the tweet is an article from BFM Business published early Tuesday evening. His column reviews “predictive policing” software used in the United States, the United Kingdom and China. No official French announcement there, not a ministry cited, not a published text.
France has this in one sentence: the country “has started some experiments via Smart Police”. The cocktail of social networks, video surveillance and criminal records describes American or British tools. AlertesInfos merged the two ideas into a FLASH.
On the government side, nothing. No announcement on the website of the Ministry of the Interior, no statement from Laurent Nuñez or Sébastien Lecornu on anticipatory AI.
Let's not be naive though: the subject is not taboo. We let our ears wander on Tuesday to questions to the government: entire session devoted to October 17, 18 questions in a row, all groups at the microphone.
Nuñez recognized a coordination of looters “through social networks” and intelligence that “identified many things, but not everything”. Sylvain Maillard, for the Macronists, called for a ban on the geolocation of looting videos.
Not a word on AI, facial recognition or drones in two hours of debate. What the executive really took out of its toolbox can be summed up in four lines:
200 investigators assigned to videos posted online by the rioters themselves.
A prefectural decree of October 16 authorizing up to twelve airborne cameras above Paris.
The convening of TikTok, Meta, Snapchat and Google by Deputy Minister Anne Le Hénanff on October 20.
The good old TAJ file, which since 2012 has compared a filmed face to nine million police custody photos, after the fact and only following a judicial investigation.
Smart Police: a predictive AI that works hand-in-hand
The software cited by BFM belongs to Edicia, a Nantes company registered in 2003 and bought in December 2024 by the Luxembourg holding company HorizonH. 2.56 million euros in turnover in 2024, and a municipal police clientele. Its general manager Sébastien Talbot was the guest of BFM Business on July 22, to “manage security through facts”. The world is small.
At the start of 2024, Quadrature du Net noted that the Edicia site claimed services from the Ministry of the Interior among its clients. Questioned by CADA request, the ministry replied that there was no link. The mention has since disappeared.
Its “Predict” module displays a map of the municipality and a color code at three levels per district, for six hours over six days. The 2018 patent describes a Bayesian network and a genetic algorithm to distribute patrols: statistics from the 2010s, unrelated to current language models. Its input data, according to the user manual?
Agent handrails, hand-entered “rumor” sheets, staffing schedules and the weather.
Social media now. Edicia has been promising their automatic integration since 2013. The Quadrature report described it “still in the planning stage” in 2022, and the house project called Zenith is still written in the future tense on the site.
Video surveillance is limited to photos taken by officers with their phones. Judicial data is out of reach, as municipal police do not have access to the TAJ. Only one municipality, Libourne, has documented real use of the module. She has been testing it since 2019 without evaluation.
And Edicia refused to communicate her code to Libourne in the name of business secrecy.
Who buys Smart Police and why
Edicia claims 350 client cities on its site, 250 on LinkedIn, who knows. Its home page displays six: Grand Paris Sud, the Nice Côte d’Azur metropolis, Roissy Pays de France, Saint-Denis, Libourne and Woippy.
Intermunicipalities in the Ile-de-France region, a metropolis with heavy video surveillance, a town in Gironde, a Moselle commune of 14,000 inhabitants. Same problem everywhere, which Edicia herself summarizes in her trade show reports: agents difficult to recruit, high turnover, no access to national files, data scattered between services.
A municipal police force is first and foremost a handrail, reports and schedules to complete with too few agents. Smart Police sells it all in one tablet, with prediction as a bonus. And this is the bonus that ends up in the brochures: “+40%” in efficiency and “-30%” in feeling of insecurity promised on the site, without the slightest study behind it.
The discourse has changed register since the takeover. No more “prediction”, make way for the “continuum of territorial data” and a “logic of anticipation”, says Sébastien Talbot on BFM Business. Better: in July, Edicia explained on LinkedIn that after the decision of the Council of State, having images analyzed by an algorithm is not authorized “as long as no text explicitly provides for it”. The publisher brandished as proof of anti-riot AI therefore itself warns its customers.
For Quadrature, the same tool encourages the filing of “rumors” and people outside of any framework, under the eye of a CNIL which has never opened the file. This is the real debate, a thousand miles from the AI that reads your tweets.
What the law really allows against riots
The framework moved this summer, but not in the direction of the tweet. The Ripost law of August 18, 2026 extends algorithmic video surveillance until December 31, 2030 and extends it to places exposed to terrorism, with a continued ban on all facial recognition and any cross-referencing of files.
Against the city of Nice, the Council of State ruled on January 30, 2026 that no systematic algorithmic analysis of images is permitted outside of this experiment.
Since February 2, 2025, the European regulation on AI has banned predictive policing targeting individuals, and classifies geographic prediction as “high risk”.
Mediacités revealed Monday that the Toulouse municipal police tested software from Orasio capable of tracking people on its 710 cameras, in the middle of a legal gray area. Since Monday, Gabriel Attal has been calling for French catch-up on facial recognition and targeted blocking of platforms.
Saturday October 24, Act II will parade under drones, in front of human investigators and a file from 2012. Laurent Nuñez promised Tuesday before the deputies that “the doctrine will be reviewed”.
As for AlertesInfos, 389,000 views for a FLASH cut from a TV column, that's a lot: the account has gotten into the habit of shooting faster than its sources, and this time it got it wrong.
