❯ Mistral releases its trillion-parameter Large 4, which third-party testing calls the strongest model from outside the US and China

Nicknamed "Le Chonk"French AI company Mistral released a public preview of Mistral Large 4 on October 6, officially nicknamed “Le Chonk.” According to AI Weekly, it has 1 trillion total parameters with 49 billion active at a time and supports more than 160 languages, including every official EU language. It became available through the API that day at $1.36 per million input tokens and $4.18 per million output tokens, with weights due on October 27.

Trained in its own European data centersMistral says the model was trained on 3,800 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs in its own data centers in Europe, and that much of the training data was multilingual. Reported scores include about 62% on the coding test DeepSWE and 93% on the security test Cybench. AI Weekly cautions that 62% still trails closed models clustered around 74% and that the figures need third-party validation.

The third-party viewBenchmarking firm Artificial Analysis scores it 38 on its Intelligence Index, says France once again has the most intelligent model from outside the US and China, and puts it on a par with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. Mistral’s CEO told Reuters the new model is above the Chinese models on certain aspects, including cyber, and that the narrative that Europe cannot compete is not true.

The case for European customersFor European companies and government bodies whose data must stay local, an open-weight model trained in Europe that they can deploy themselves answers questions of compliance and sovereignty, not only performance. Like Reflection’s Beam, the American model released a day earlier, it frames its rivals as China’s open models, not the closed flagships from OpenAI or Anthropic.

▮ SIGNALOpen models from Europe and America are both measuring themselves against Chinese ones, so on the open-weight track there is no longer any dispute about who leads.