Mistral Launches Mistral Large 4, a 1-Trillion-Parameter Open-Weight Model Nicknamed 'Le Chonk'

Mistral AI announced Mistral Large 4 on October 6, 2026, an open-weight flagship model the company says leapfrogs both closed and open rivals, including top Chinese open-weight systems. Internally nicknamed “Le Chonk” for its size, the model is available now in preview through Mistral’s API, with full open weights scheduled for release on October 27.

Details

• Architecture: a natively multimodal, hybrid instruct-and-reasoning Mixture-of-Experts model with 1 trillion total parameters, 49 billion active per token, and a 1.6-billion-parameter vision encoder
• Training: trained from scratch on 3,800 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs in Mistral’s own European data centers; post-training generates roughly 33 billion tokens per day (16 billion trainable completion tokens) through large-scale reinforcement learning
• Benchmarks: ranks top 5 on the Artificial Analysis Cyber Index with 93% on Cybench and 82% on a vulnerability-reproduction test (CyberGym-E2E); scores 61.7% on DeepSWE v1.1 and 28.3% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 for coding; edges out GPT-6-Astra on a visual-grounding benchmark (42% vs. 41%)
• Languages: fluent across more than 160 languages, including all official EU languages
• Availability and pricing: preview access now via Mistral Studio API at $1.36 per million input tokens and $4.18 per million output tokens; deployable across multiple worldwide regions, including an independently operated European deployment governed by EU law; open weights land October 27, 2026
• Positioning: Mistral frames the release as part of a European “third way” in AI, alongside comments from French President Emmanuel Macron, and says the model beats several Chinese open-weight systems in specific areas

What happened next

The launch sharpens the three-way race between US labs, Chinese open-weight developers, and Mistral’s bet on European “sovereign AI” — European data centers, EU-law-governed deployment options, and open weights aimed at both commercial and government customers who want an alternative to US and Chinese infrastructure. With full weights not landing until October 27, independent verification of Mistral’s benchmark claims will have to wait, but the announcement puts pressure on rivals ahead of that date.