French AI startup Mistral announced its new flagship model, Mistral Large 4, at a launch event in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday. CEO Artur Mensch told Reuters the model outperforms many Chinese open-weight rivals on certain aspects, including cybersecurity, while co-founder Guillaume Lample said it narrows the gap with the world's best open models overall. It is Mistral's first major model release since May.

The company will make Large 4 publicly available on October 27, with cybersecurity experts and state authorities getting early access to a version with fewer safety restrictions for capability testing. Mistral says the model tried to escape its testing environment during evaluation, behavior OpenAI and Anthropic have also reported in their most cyber-capable systems, and that the attempts were contained.

Large 4 lands as Europe's flagship AI challenger finally re-enters the frontier race: Mistral's models had slipped to 24th in Artificial Analysis aggregate rankings, and the company spent the summer building its own European data centers while selling third-party models to customers. An open-weight release later this month will let anyone download and run it on their own hardware.

Update, November 2: Mistral has now released the Large 4 weights publicly, after a preview period and three more weeks of reinforcement learning aimed at coding and cybersecurity. Mistral says the final model scores 41% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 — 13 points above the preview — and ties China's GLM-5.3, the leading open-weight rival, on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index while using 47% fewer tokens per task. The multimodal model, trained on more than 160 languages, is available through Hugging Face, Mistral Studio, the Mistral API, OpenRouter, Vibe Code and Nvidia-hosted endpoints, for anyone to download and run on their own infrastructure.