i don’t really understand what europe thinks the game is anymore. the us and china clearly figured out that ai is no longer just a productivity tool or a chatbot market. it is infrastructure, military leverage, cyber capability, industrial policy, chip strategy, standards, cloud, talent, everything at once. whoever falls behind does not just lose some app users. they lose the ability to shape the next layer of the economy. and then there is mistral. i don’t think mistral is “bad” in the sense that it is useless. open weights, european deployment, privacy, on-prem, enterprise control, all of that matters. but if the public narrative is “europe’s answer to openai and china”, then the models have to feel like a serious answer, not like something that would have been frontier two or three years ago. sovereignty cannot just mean “we have a weaker model, but at least the server is in europe”. that is not technological independence. that is a consolation prize. maybe mistral’s real target is not frontier ai at all. maybe the real business is governments, banks, regulated companies, local deployment and compliance. that is valid. but then europe should stop pretending this is the same race the us and china are running. because right now it looks like america and china are fighting over who owns the future, while europe is proudly shipping a very polite, legally compliant, slightly outdated assistant. so my question is simple: is mistral actually trying to compete at the frontier, or is europe just redefining “winning” as “being less dependent while still being behind”?

upd: i think i worded the post too aggressively, so a lot of people read it as “mistral is trash” or “europe should stop developing its own models”. that was not really my point.

i do not think mistral is useless. if their real focus is enterprise, on-prem, regulated deployment, industrial ai and sovereign infrastructure, then that is a valid direction. i also agree that a weaker european model is still better than having no european model at all.

my criticism is more about the eu-level narrative. europe talks about ai sovereignty and strategic independence, but in practice we are still heavily dependent on foreign cloud, chips, operating systems, platforms, ai APIs and infrastructure. if ai becomes a core layer of the economy, then being “sovereign but permanently behind” is still a problem.

so no, i am not asking europe to blindly throw trillions into llm hype. i am saying europe should take the whole digital stack more seriously: compute, datacenters, chips, open models, talent, cyber defense, industrial deployment and public-sector infrastructure.

basically, my issue is not “mistral should not exist”. it is the opposite: europe needs more serious ai and digital infrastructure, not just regulation, slogans and symbolic sovereignty.

Okay, I see the vision.

So from what I can tell, Mistral is trying to be more of a software company than an AI startup. I mean, obviously LLMs are a core part of Mistral, but, and it's a big but, the software around LLMs plays a huge role here.

Allow me to explain.

Take DeepSeek as an example. Their chat application is bare bones, buggy garbage. DeepSeek does not care about its chat application.

If you go to the DeepSeek API platform, it is much more polished than their chat application, but still quite bare bones.

Now compare DeepSeek to Mistral. Vibe chat is not perfect, but it sure is a much better experience than anything I've seen from Chinese AI labs. And from what I can tell, the chat application is integrated with Studio and the admin panel. Also, there are a whole bunch of integrations, like Slack, for example.

This is awesome! It's something you can propose to your CTO and not get laughed at.

No, I'm serious. Z.ai, Moonshot, and DeepSeek are not even close to Mistral when it comes to user facing software.

And now that they use GLM 5.2, they pretty much have a solid stack when it comes to LLMs. From my personal testing, GLM and Mistral Small are really good models.

As long as they don't reduce my 300 bucks GLM limits, I will be a Mistral fanboy now.

Very sneaky of you French people. Very sneaky.

Chart taken from https://isaiprofitable.com/. It shows how the resources available to Mistral are dwarfed by the massive spending of Microsoft, Amazon and Google or even Anthropic and OpenAI.

Mistral Medium 3.5 is a damn solid model and I'm really happy to see Mistral is keeping up!

2024 they were among one of the top players, the founders are definitely experts in AI research, coming from reputable labs like DeepMind and Meta FAIR.

Looks like none of their models during the last year were SOTA at all in terms of intelligence, and not even in terms of efficiency.
Looking at the intelligence of their latest model released (IIRC May 2026) - Mistral Medium 3.5 ranks bellow Claude Haiku 4.5 (released in 2025) in intelligence benchmarks at the same time requiring 128b vs Haiku's 21b parameters - 6 times the size for a worse result.

It genuinely seems like there isn't even an attempt to compete anymore.

The newest open weight models from China make Mistral's most powerful model look like an antique.

USA and China are moving very rapidly and Mistral seems to be taking a nap and totally unbothered with how far behind they are falling.

It's great China is pushing open weight. But Mistral becoming just an EU model hosting provider is deeply concerning. China is releasing these models to counter American influence. As soon as it stops benefiting them to do that, they will stop.

Mistral really needs to step it up or I'm worried Europe will be totally out of the race, and that would only be good to USA.

Don't get me wrong, I want Mistral to succeed. When you are failing you need those who care the most to be honest with you.

Hi, I'm Ukrainian UX designer and lecturer. Last week, Starlink terminals our military relies on got a speed cap overnight (drones started losing connection mid-mission above 160 km/h), no warning, no explanation. The same week our government said we no longer get the usual advance notice about incoming ballistic missiles. Nobody declared anything, tools just stopped working when it mattered most. That's the context for my question about AI tools, because I ask it about everything now: who can switch this off, and what do I do the day they do?

That's why I've moved my workflow (teaching materials, design work, my local agent stack) to Mistral. Not because it beats frontier benchmarks (it doesn't), but because the question stopped being hypothetical: in summer US government pulled Claude Fable 5, Mythos 5 and GPT-5.6 from general access just by directive. Also, monthly usage instead of 5-hour windows, EU data residency, open weights I can actually download (yes, the frontier won't fit my VRAM, but...)
So, honest question from the cheap seats: is "good enough + sovereign + open" a fair trade against frontier capability, or am I coping? Curious how others outside the US weigh this.

A new stealth model, union-alpha, has appeared on Openrouter.

It beats Kimi K3, GLM 5.3 and GPT 5.6 Sol xhigh on DeepSWE Pro. It barely costs more than Luna max or DS V4.

It has 262K context window, the same as Mistral Small 4.

The name could potentially be a nod to the EU.

Many stealth models are revealed a week later. In one week's time, Mistral will be at AI Summit Barcelona.

Is Mistral back?

Edit: Looks like they're not back. It's almost certainly an orchestrator model, from a US lab.

I've been using Mistral for two years, I've been through highs and lows, and I've mostly had to use it for web research, editing small texts, translations, mini agents, or simple though repetitive CLI operations. Until now, I've always had to keep subscriptions to other platforms open to fully manage my work as a manager (digesting large documents, planning and monitoring projects, brainstorming strategies, and so on).In particular, ChatGPT has been essential to my daily routine.

Since GLM arrived on Mistral, I've made the decision to cancel my ChatGPT subscription; I had already done that when Medium 3.5 came out, but then I had to go back. This time looks like the right one.

If Mistral 4 lives up to GLM 5.3, I'd say my goal of breaking away from American platforms has been fully achieved

Could it be Mistral?

256k Context window.

Built for Agentic Coding

Supports Images

Openrouter description: "Union Alpha is a multimodal model built for research, coding, and agentic workflows, while delivering frontier-level performance across a broad range of general-purpose tasks."

Arthur Mensch said in June: "We're opening up an early access program in July for key partners in research, government and the industry."

It is rumored that they will release their next model very soon....

👀?

Just speculation guys! Let me know what you think

This isn't a troll post, or just hating on Mistral.

From today, in the web UI or 'Vibe' ("le chat" forever ✊) - the "chat" and "work" modes have combined into one and GLM from Z.ai is now the default model.

There is no way to change the model you get in the web UI. No method to switch back to a mistral model.

So.... what is the point of Mistral now?

I came to mistral because I wanted to use Mistral's models. If I wanted to use Z.ai's models, I would go there.

Even GLM directly from Z.ai is cheaper.

Prices from: https://mistral.ai/pricing/api/

So, yeah, what's the point now?

I came to Mistral because they are one of the least censored and wanting to support the EU underdog.

But if I'm not even using their models any more, why bother staying when I could just move to z.ai?

I know many people don't use OpenRouter, but I think it's super interesting to see how popular certain providers there are.

Mid of August, the usage of Mistral models on OpenRouter for all models was around 5 - 12B tokens a day. Yesterday, it was a total of 152B tokens, mostly from GLM 5.2 and 5.3.

What I think is also interesting to see here though is that Large 4 still had a quite significant portion of this: Yesterday it was 27B tokens alone and the day before still and considerable 12B tokens.

Not sure how much that is in the grand scheme of things (it's probably just a fraction of total usage) but still says a lot that people WANT to use capable models form Mistral, even if models like GLM are available.

What do you think?

Mistral said they will launch a "new model by the end of the summer". Today is the last day of summer and tomorrow, Mistral is also hosting the "AI Engineer Paris" event: https://ai.engineer/paris/2026#schedule-2026-09-23

There is a session planned in the evening tomorrow called "Building frontier AI" by Mistral themselves. My prediction: They will announce a model there tomorrow.

I could of course be totally wrong but it would just fit very well. What do you think?

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated at all with Mistral AI! :)

warning: subjective opinions

just tried Le Chonk, the fat cat today.

my overall take is Mistral Is Back!

It's good at cybersecurity and prompt injection detection (though a tad paranoid, it considered harness' reminder injection attack lol)

I like its Mistral-style responses. Le Chonk can be serious, casual, lighthearted etc. this feels far more better than GLM's Claude-style boring tone!

Cons observed:

• token streaming speed seems at least 10 times slower than GLM 5.3

perhaps because it's currently in preview, hasn't been optimised for inference yet?

• struggling with complicated engineering tasks

coding ability feels good, but not excellent. probably at the same level with DeepSeek V4 Flash or GLM 5.2

For work or serious coding problems, I think I will stick to GLM 5.3 for now.

But I will choose Le Chonk for EVERYTHING ELSE!

Mistral Large 4 is a good model. I see a lot of people are unimpressed by the benchmarks or by its ability to one-shot things.

On the other hand, I've been trying it these 2 days on a project of mine (Python + Rust + QML) and I must say, it is surprisingly good, even with some problems.

It has good planning ability, can write good code and it mainly follows instructions to the letter. It's not the best model I have ever used, and maybe it is not suited for vibe-coders. On the other hand, on a project with constraints, well-defined subagents, and supervision, it is reliable and precise. Bonus points: it speaks like a sane entity without ridicoulous walls of text (try talking with Opus 5 if you've never tried).

It has some problems, for example it is too much diligent when reviewing, at times, going into loops that burn tokens; and it struggled a bit with a QML bug I gave it. But all in all, I am satisfied.

I say this as someone who was disappointed in Mistral. I had no hopes of ever seeing a good generalist model for consumers. I've been pleasantly surprised (not that it was that hard to be surprised, considering the mess Mistral Medium 3.5 is). It is not on par with Opus 5.5, but in my use case it works well, does not wander around too much, and is a good all-rounder. Who knows, maybe their larger model will be a better planner, but for now, Le Chonk will do.

Hopefully this was helpful! I just wanted to stave off a little negativity I'm reading in this subreddit.

Here is what I think about ml4 so far.

It's decent. A really good workhorse model. It is a bit more expensive than I would have liked, but overall it's decent.

The good: I really like the prose and how it structures the output by default. It's pleasant to read. Mistral Large is great when it comes to output.

The bad: It is censored into oblivion. I'm not just talking about NSFW stuff. As far as I can tell, it refuses to do cybersecurity work or reverse engineering. I absolutely despise censorship.

The great: The model is more thorough than GLM 5.3 or KIMI K3. It will try to find edge cases on its own.

The bad: It has a tendency to go into loops, which is surprising for a model this big, but it happens rarely and I think it will be fixed soon.

The good: As someone who at times is forced to deal with barbarians from Eastern Europe, and judging from my short but profound experience, I think Mistral Large 4 is good at fantasy languages like Orkish, Dwarvish, or Polish.

The bad: It ignores my instructions and puts em dashes everywhere it wants to. I'm forced to manually delete them. At this point I think ml4 just makes fun of me.

I haven't tested the vision capabilities yet, so idk what's going on on this front.

Honestly, even if GLM 5.3 disappears from Mistral's subscription, it would still be well worth buying a sub, in my personal opinion.

Can't wait for Mistral to create a robot that will do my laundry for me.

I mean look at all the other AI frontier labs especially in the US and how they behave. Already today we are far to dependent on non European LLM providers and if Trump is pissed he is cutting access. Europe lost the race about social media, it lost the raise in cloud computing and now it appears the same is going to happen in the AI race. Besides of Mistral there is no company on the horizon which would be able to compete with US and Chinese models. But already today Mistral models are far behind and the company seems loose momentum. So what could be the unique value add of this company in the future which differentiates it from other companies operating in this sector? If Europe is loosing, I suspect we all will be vassals of US and Chinese LLM Providers. I genuinely hope Mistral will become successful

This is just a follow up post from the one a few days ago. Personally, as a Canadian, I am really excited (and desperate) for a new sovereign European model. Let's go! Quotes are from Mensch here.

Been digging into what sovereign AI actually means beyond the slogan, and the numbers around Mistral are wild when you lay them out layer by layer.

About energy, France's nuclear grid produced 547.5 TWh in 2025, 95.2% low-carbon.
That's the one layer nobody planned for AI in the 70s, and it's now a real advantage while everyone else fights grid constraints.

About compute, Jean Zay, their biggest supercomputer, just quadrupled its AI capacity, and there's a €10B nuclear-powered cluster being built on top of that.

About the model, Mistral's revenue reportedly went from $20M to $400M+ in about a year, valuation closing in on $23B, and Arthur Mensch just confirmed a new open-weight flagship plus Robostral Navigate (their first physical-navigation model).

About the chips, this is the layer nobody owns, not even the US fully controls it end to end, and France (like everyone) is still renting here, subject to export licensing rules.

So the stack looks like: 3 owned layers, 1 rented.
Compare that to countries like Indonesia, which are renting the top of the stack (170k Nvidia chips incoming) before owning anything underneath.

Does owning the model layer (Mistral) actually matter if the chip layer is rented from the US either way?

Or is "sovereign AI" just a ledger of which layers you own vs rent, not an all-or-nothing flag?

Is this too good to be true?

So, let me get this straight, I get a shit ton of GLM 5.2 for just 15 USD per month.

On top of that, there are no weekly or 5 hour limits, right?

And I can plug my Vibe Key into any third party software I want.

And on top of that, it's not censored.

And on top of that, it's somewhat private.

Wha... What?

I don't believe it. Something fishy is going on here. I'm tempted to buy yearly... Very tempted...

I used to be a CGPT power-user untill they morally started shitting the bed. Did entire projects, both professionally and as hobby with GPT and found enormous help in reasoning, literature research, simple logo and artwork generation, summarising and translation, factchecking and calculation basework. Once it became clear how deep the shithole of american AI was I ended my paid subscription and went to Mistral as the promoted ethical and sustainable alternative.

And boy o boy is that a big step back, like a leap. CGPT felt like having a very capable sr-engineer with unlimited knowledge and pretty impressive "creative" skills. Mistral feels like having a bottom tier trainee that refuses to learn, listen and always does the absolute minimum required.

It hallucinates constantly, to a point where that is not and exception, but its ground state. Answers are short and very obvious, anyone with some base skill in googling does not need what Le Chat delivers, at all. Its image generation is just shit, first-renders are badly basic and getting from there to something better iteratively is a frustrating process with zero result. Document work, summarising, translating, style and fact checks are absolutely bottom tier quality. Very often it just stops halfway, anything more than 2-3 pages is just not something Le Chat will do. It incessantly introduces faults and hallucinations, changes abbreviations or numbers and the base quality of the text it produces is like a roomtemperature-IQ accountant wrote it. Its memory is virtually non-existent and even when I explicitly give it rules to always follow, it will quote and remember them wrongly and generally fail to apply them to any reasonable extent.

In general any correction or iterative work is very clearly not something the model is built for and I feel the people behind it have no idea what a user expects from a modern model. I can get why it is like this, and how other models got to where they are by plain old infringement and IP abuse, but holy damn I refuse to believe this is the only viable alternative. I just can’t get over how bad it is in comparison. I now use Gemini in google, and it’s sooo much better in anything I need form it, and that’s a bloody free search bar tool!

I work with scientist, highly educated and progressively minded people a lot. My emotions and conclusions about Mistral are repeated and validated constantly around me. Most of them at one point switched for moral reasons. Most of them either stopped using AI entirely or switched back to “worse” alternatives because Le Chat simply is not helping them in the way we’ve come to expect from an AI model.

I’m so sorry rant but I really, REALLY, wanted a sustainable and compliant EU based model to use that didn’t have the moral ethics of a slave owner. The level of quality Le Chat/ Mistral provides is just abysmal and in no real way competitive to anything and it pains me so much to see this. I haven’t done a single thing with it that didn’t end up in frustration and I’ve cancelled my paid subscription, even though I kept it going for a while just to support a good cause. I just wish so badly it was better or would improve but I see no sign of any of that in the last 8 months I used it.

I wish AI wouldn’t be such a cesspit where your only two options are either late stage capitalism, or semi-verbal autism.

Looks like they installed a safety filter on and all of the NSFW content has been nuked. Hope this doesn’t last forever. I have been using Mistral for nsfw stuff a lot since the beginning of 2025. 😒

The CEO predicted back in June that the new model would be unveiled this summer, and it seems like there are just a few weeks left of summer now. I hope we get at least a little sneak peek. GLM is difficult to use for my purposes because it doesn't recognize image.

P.S. If any Mistral employees happen to read this, why not consider changing your product naming convention? Adding “stral” to the end of every product name seems a bit ...dowdy.