Mistral released the open weights of an improved Mistral Large 4, and an independent test ranks it the best open model built outside China.

Mistral on Thursday released the weights of an updated Mistral Large 4, nicknamed "Le Chonk," which it first put out as a public preview earlier this month (Mistral, Mistral on X).

Open weights means you can download the model and run or customize it yourself instead of only using it through Mistral's service. It's a very large mixture-of-experts model: about 1 trillion parameters in total, with roughly 52 billion active for each word it generates, plus a 1 million-token context window and image input. Mistral says it's "the best open-weight model for coding," with leading scores on Cognition's private FrontierCode 2.0 test and on Terminal-Bench 4.0, and strong results on defensive cybersecurity work. Those are Mistral's claims. Artificial Analysis, which tested it independently, calls it "narrowly" the #1 open-weight model developed outside China, one point ahead of Muse Spark Open on its Intelligence Index.

It still trails the leading open models from China, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and GLM-5.3, by six points, and in its runs scored 15% on FrontierCode 2.0 against 29% and 22% for those two (Artificial Analysis on X). Artificial Analysis also found it uses far fewer tokens per task than the preview and hallucinates less (28%, down from 41%). The API price is $0.70 per million input tokens and $2.10 per million output tokens, about half the preview's price. It's available in Mistral Studio, the Mistral API, OpenRouter and Mistral's Vibe Code tool, and the weights are on Hugging Face. The license is free to use, modify and sell products with, but companies that sell access to the model itself as a hosted service need a separate commercial license from Mistral. NVIDIA says it was trained from scratch on 3,800 of its Grace Blackwell GPUs (NVIDIA AI on X).

What to weigh: this is a strong, cheap option, especially if you want a model that isn't from a US or Chinese lab. But running it yourself takes multiple data-center GPUs, so most people will use it through the API or OpenRouter. And independent tests put it a step behind the top Chinese open models on coding, despite Mistral's benchmark claims.