Mistral Puts 1T-Parameter Large 4 on a Paid Preview API; Weights by Month-End, AA Scores 38
Mistral launched a paid Studio preview of Mistral Large 4 (ML4 / "le Chonk") on Oct. 6: a natively multimodal MoE with about 1.05T total / 49B active parameters, trained from scratch on 3,800 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs in its European data centres. Mistral says it will release the weights by the end of the month; TechCrunch and The Next Web put that closer to Oct. 27. Artificial Analysis's first independent Intelligence Index score for the preview is 38 (#64 of 225), behind top open-weight models MiMo-V2.6-Pro (46), GLM-5.3 (45) and Kimi K3 (44). Most other benches are Mistral's own on a checkpoint it says will change.
Europe's open-weight lab just put a trillion-parameter-class model on a paid API — and gave cybersecurity partners a less-moderated build before the rest of the internet gets the weights. The first independent general score is not a crown.
Mistral AI on October 6 opened a public preview of Mistral Large 4 (ML4, nicknamed "le Chonk") on Mistral Studio. The company says it will release the weights by the end of the month. TechCrunch and The Next Web report a date closer to October 27. Until then, Mistral says it is red-teaming with cybersecurity leaders, vetted partners, and state authorities, who get the same model with reduced moderation and expanded cyber capabilities.
What shipped
Per Mistral's post and docs:
- A natively multimodal granular mixture-of-experts: Mistral's post rounds to 1T parameters; docs list 1.05T total / 49B active, plus a 1.6B vision encoder. Listed as Public Preview, Open, v26.10.
- Trained from scratch on 3,800 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs in Mistral's own European data centres, which also serve the preview. VP Science Pierre Stock told TechCrunch the training used "only 4,000" GPUs — treat 3,800 as the primary figure.
- Target uses Stock named for TechCrunch: cybersecurity, finance, and chip design.
- Mistral calls ML4 the first milestone funded by its €3B Series D (prior coverage).
Context-window figures conflict: docs say 1M; Artificial Analysis lists 524k for the preview endpoint. Do not treat either as settled without saying which source.
Claims vs checks
Mistral-reported benches on the preview checkpoint (Mistral says its RL run is still in flight):
| Bench | Score (Mistral) |
|---|---|
| DeepSWE v1.1 | 61.7% |
| Terminal-Bench 4 | 28.3% |
| AutomationBench | 59.9% |
| Cybench | 93% |
| Lakera B3 (attack resistance) | 93.3% |
| Surge AI coding (blind, of 5) | 3.74 (2nd), behind Claude Opus 5 at 4.22 |
Artificial Analysis — first independent general read — lists Mistral Large 4 Preview at 38 on its Intelligence Index (#64 of 225), priced at $1.36 / $4.18 per million input/output tokens. On the same board, top open-weight models are MiMo-V2.6-Pro 46, GLM-5.3 (max) 45, and Kimi K3 (max) 44. That puts the preview well behind the Chinese open frontier on this index — not a verdict on the final checkpoint.
Mistral says ML4 significantly outperforms any U.S. or European open-weight model and is competitive with the strongest open models globally. Reflection's Beam is making a similar "best open outside China" pitch; neither has public weights yet. Re-test when the weights land.
The release design
The sovereignty pitch is explicit: trained and served on European compute under European law. The contested design choice is the pre-weights access for governments and vetted security firms to a less-moderated, more cyber-capable build. Mistral argues closed models' refusals hurt defenders. That widens access to offensive-capable tooling; the cyber evaluations behind the pitch are largely Mistral's own. Attribute any "AA Cyber Index top five" claim to Mistral — it was not visible in the AA HTML we inspected.
Limits
- Weights date: prefer Mistral's "end of the month"; attribute Oct. 27 if using secondary outlets.
- Licence for the weights is unconfirmed in the post and docs we read. Do not call them Apache or "open source" until a licence ships.
- Nearly all benches except AA's Intelligence Index are vendor-reported on a preview checkpoint.
- Docs show a second, unlabelled price set at roughly half AA's figures ($0.68/$2.09); print $1.36/$4.18 from AA unless Mistral labels the discount.
- Context: 1M (docs) vs 524k (AA) — attribute before printing.
Sources
- Mistral AI: Introducing Mistral Large 4 (October 6, 2026)
- Mistral Docs: Mistral Large 4 (October 6, 2026)
- Artificial Analysis: Mistral Large 4 Preview (October 6, 2026)
- Artificial Analysis: LLM Leaderboard
- TechCrunch: Mistral's new 1T model aims to leapfrog closed and open rivals (October 6, 2026)
- Times of AI: Mistral's €3B Series D (September 8, 2026)
- Times of AI: Reflection Beam open-weight imminent (October 4, 2026)