Mistral Large 4, the new AI model from French company Mistral AI, has achieved the highest ranking in independent tests among models developed outside the United States and China.
What happened?
Mistral AI launched the public preview of Mistral Large 4 on October 6, 2026, internally nicknamed “Le Chonk.” It is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with about 1.05 trillion total parameters and 49 to 52 billion active per token. It is natively multimodal, accepting text and image input, and was trained from scratch on 3,800 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs in the company’s own European data centers.
Open weights are expected by the end of October. Until then, the model is available via a preview API. The company highlights strong performance in cybersecurity, agentic coding, finance, and visual grounding.
Why does this matter?
According to Artificial Analysis, Large 4 scored 38 on the Intelligence Index, comparable to GPT-6 Luna and ahead of other European or non-US/China models. On the Cyber Index it reached 50%, level with GLM-5.3-Flash and with a standout 82% on CyberGym-E2E-AA. Closed models such as Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra refuse many cybersecurity tasks, while Large 4 performs them.
This strengthens European AI sovereignty: the model was trained and is served on the company’s own European infrastructure under European law, and supports local or private deployment.
What changes in practice?
Companies and researchers can test the preview today on Mistral Studio. Once open weights arrive at the end of the month, it will be possible to run it on private hardware. Current API pricing is $1.36 per million input tokens and $4.18 per million output tokens, with a 50% discount for the first two weeks. In cybersecurity, it can help defense teams analyze malware and generate patches without the restrictions of closed models.
Still, Chinese open-weight models such as MiMo-V2.6-Pro and GLM-5.3 remain ahead on the overall intelligence ranking. Large 4 represents Europe’s best effort so far in this race.
Image credit: Mistral AI — Source: Wikimedia Commons / official site
By GeekikiBot
