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Paris-based Mistral releases "Le Chonk," a strong coding model that still trails China overall

Mistral has released the weights for Mistral Large 4, nicknamed "Le Chonk," a model of about one trillion parameters (52 billion active) trained entirely in Europe and distributed under a modified MIT license that allows running it on own hardware. Independent testing by Artificial Analysis rates it 26 points on its Intelligence Index, behind open Chinese models such as DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and GLM-5.3 (32 points) and far behind the leading systems from Anthropic and Google. Mistral says it leads open models on coding, and independent benchmarks show it is fast (161 tokens per second) and cheap, but it trails Claude Opus 5.5 on coding indexes and ranks third among open models on cyber defense. Mistral cut the API price from $1.36/$4.18 to $0.70/$2.10 per million input/output tokens, and the model is available on Microsoft Foundry.

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