Mistral releases latest AI model for download, giving companies more control over their cybersecurity - Euronews.com
French AI firm Mistral has released the weights for its latest large model, Mistral Large 4 (ML4), nicknamed 'Le Chonk', offering improved coding and cyber defense capabilities as Europe seeks alternatives to US and Chinese technology.
The French firm claims the model is 'the best open agentic coding model in the world', offering enterprises and governments 'frontier AI cyber defence capabilities they can fully own and control' including the ability to 'detect, analyse and respond to cyberthreats across code and IT infrastructure'.
The release follows a preview of ML4 on 6 October. Since then, Mistral has spent the last three weeks reinforcing the model's learning, testing it with customers and partners under real-world conditions.
ML4 OSS showcases our science team's ability to innovate at speed. Building on the ML4 Preview, the open weight version continues reinforcement learning training and delivers substantial gains with no signs of saturation.
Coding and Efficiency Improvements
Mistral says the latest release of ML4 rivals other leading open models for coding while using 47% fewer tokens per task on average than Chinese model GLM-5.3. Its score on Terminal-Bench 4.0, which tests AI agents' ability to perform coding tasks in a terminal, also rose from 28% to 41% following further training.
The model has 1.05 trillion parameters in total but activates around 52 billion, meaning it doesn't use all parameters for every task, helping it process requests more efficiently. It also offers three reasoning modes — low, medium and high — allowing users to adjust the depth of reasoning to suit the task.
European Cybersecurity Context
The release comes as Europe faces growing cybersecurity threats, such as the recent PHP programming security flaw discovered using AI, as well as recent cyber-attacks on the Belgian and Norwegian governments.
Making the model's weights available allows organisations to download and run it on their own infrastructure, rather than relying exclusively on an external provider's hosted service. This could be particularly useful for companies handling sensitive information, such as proprietary software code.
The move comes amid concerns about European dependence on US AI providers. In June, the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for foreign nationals, highlighting how decisions made outside Europe can affect access to advanced AI services.
Europe's AI Ambitions
Europe continues to lag behind the US and China in the development of large AI models and the resources needed to build them. Mistral is one of Europe's leading AI developers, but its reported valuation of around $24 billion is far below those of US rivals OpenAI and Anthropic.
The model was trained on 3,800 of US company Nvidia's Grace Blackwell GPUs at Mistral's European data centers. Mistral says ML4 achieves 'state-of-the-art performance' while mobilizing 'a fraction of the compute and capital committed by closed labs' such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Versatile Applications
Mistral says ML4 can turn 2D blueprints into usable 3D models using computer-aided design (CAD) software, analyze large volumes of data to support financial decision-making and use satellite and aerial imagery to detect wildfires, track crop health and monitor risks to power lines.
The French firm says the release of ML4 is part of a new generation of models spanning all modalities and that they plan to release more models from this generation in the coming months. The model is now available through Mistral's API, while its weights can be downloaded from Hugging Face.
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