Mistral unveils le Chonk, says "significantly outperforms” any open-weight models developed in US or Europe

Mistral today unveiled its largest and “most capable” AI model to date, the company said, amid a global race for AI supremacy.

The French AI company says its new one trillion-parameter multimodal model, Mistral Large 4—nicknamed le Chonk—can compete with the strongest open-source models globally while "significantly outperforming” any open-weight model developed in the US or Europe.

Mistral said the model demonstrates “exceptional performance” across coding, agentic workflows, and multimodal understanding. It added: "On critical enterprise workloads, including cybersecurity, finance and law, we find it to be state-of-the-art among open models. In some domains such as visual grounding, it goes further still, surpassing even frontier closed models.”

The model, which has been launched in preview to developers, will be made fully available later this month and Mistral plans to make it available through Mistral’s API.

Mistral has long been seen as a European competitor in developing AI models to US labs, like Anthropic and OpenAI, and cheaper open-source Chinese models.

Mistral, which raised around  $3.4bn in a Series D round in September at an around $24bn valuation, has also started making third-party models available to its customers.