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Mistral releases weights for Large 4, citing coding and cyber gains
Mistral AI said Thursday it released open weights for Mistral Large 4 (Le Chonk), claiming it now leads or ties top open models on coding and cybersecurity tests.
- Techmeme is now reporting this
- New headline Was: “Mistral opens Large 4 weights, citing coding and cyber benchmark leads”
- Our desk updated its story
- Still developing
- mistral.ai is now reporting this
- New headline Was: “Mistral Says Its AI Model ‘Le Chonk’ Has Leapfrogged China in the Open-Weight Race”
- Our desk filed its story
- First reported by Wired
French AI lab Mistral AI said Thursday it released the weights of an improved Mistral Large 4, nicknamed Le Chonk, after additional reinforcement learning aimed at coding and defensive cybersecurity1,3.
The company described the model as a 1-trillion-parameter, natively multimodal system that had been in public preview earlier in the month and was trained from scratch on European infrastructure1.
On the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, it reported a 48% score, effectively tied with GLM-5.3, while using 47% fewer tokens per task on average, and said Large 4 now ranks as the best open-weight model for coding in its tests1,3.
It said the model scored 19.7% on Cognition's private FrontierCode 2.0 test and 41% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, up 13 percentage points from the preview, with 30% fewer output tokens1.
For defensive security, Mistral reported 51% on the Artificial Analysis Cyber Index and said the model averaged a 96.6% refusal rate on malicious cyber requests, the highest among open models it measured1.
The company also listed three reasoning modes (low, medium, and high as default), Finch scores of 73.3% for finance workflows, 84.5% on BrowseComp, and 97.1% attack resistance on the B3 Agent Security Benchmark1.
Weights are available on Hugging Face for self-hosting with vLLM or SGLang, and through Mistral's API, Studio, OpenRouter, and NVIDIA-hosted endpoints, under a modified MIT license that requires a separate commercial license for model-as-a-service offerings1.
API list prices were given as $0.70 per million input tokens, $0.07 cached input, and $2.10 output1.
Wired reported Mistral's claim that the finalized Le Chonk matches or outperforms leading Chinese open-weight models from DeepSeek and Z.ai on coding and cybersecurity2.
Pierre Stock, Mistral's vice president of science, told reporters it was a pivotal moment for enterprises and governments defending against cyber threats, and said Chinese models could be threat vectors that cannot be cut off the way a proprietary API can2.
Rafe Pilling of Sophos told Wired the technology is dual-use and that any advanced model can behave badly without monitoring, regardless of country of origin2.
Mistral said it saw potential for the preview model to help real attacks, is tightening guardrails, and is giving vetted partners preview access to a specialized cybersecurity variant restricted to authorized systems1.
Sources
- mistral.aiWe're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4
- WiredMistral Says Its AI Model ‘Le Chonk’ Has Leapfrogged China in the Open-Weight Race
- TechmemeMistral releases the weights for Mistral Large 4, or Le Chonk, and says it rivals top open models such as GLM-5.3 on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index (Radhika Rajkumar/ZDNET)
How it’s being reported
3 sourcesFirst reported by 
Wired
We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4
Open weights, European training, coding and defensive-security scores, three reasoning modes, license and API prices.
The French lab posted that improved Large 4 weights are out, with benchmark claims on coding, cyber defense, and cheaper reasoning.
Leaves out Independent outside verification of the new scores; security researchers' dual-use concerns.
WiredFirstMistral Says Its AI Model ‘Le Chonk’ Has Leapfrogged China in the Open-Weight Race
The open-weight race with Chinese labs, comments from Mistral's Pierre Stock, and dual-use risk from freely downloadable weights.
Wired reported Mistral's claim that the finalized Le Chonk matches or beats leading Chinese open-weight models on coding and cybersecurity.
Leaves out The specific benchmark numbers, license terms, and API prices in Mistral's blog.
Mistral releases the weights for Mistral Large 4, or Le Chonk, and says it rivals top open models such as GLM-5.3 on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index (Radhika Rajkumar/ZDNET)
The weight release and the coding-index comparison with GLM-5.3.
Aggregator pointer to ZDNET coverage that Mistral released Large 4 weights and says it rivals GLM-5.3 on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index.
Leaves out Full benchmark tables, license details, and the cybersecurity dual-use debate.
Where they agree
- Mistral released open weights for Mistral Large 4 / Le Chonk.
- The company says the model now rivals or leads top open-weight systems on coding, including GLM-5.3 on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index.
Where they differ
Whether Large 4 is the world's best open-weight model for coding and cybersecurity