# WIRED — Mistral Says Its AI Model ‘Le Chonk’ Has Leapfrogged China in the Open-Weight Race

- Company: WIRED (wired.com)
- Announced: 2026-10-29T14:00:00+00:00
- Category: new-model
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: yes
- Group: models
- Source: https://www.wired.com/story/mistral-says-le-chonk-surpasses-chinese-models-cybersecurity/
- Record: https://forck.live/items/29351-mistral-says-its-ai-model-le-chonk-has-leapfrogged-china-in-the-open-weight-race
- Subject: Reporting
- Open weights: yes
- Models affected: Le Chonk

Mistral says its trillion-parameter open-weight model Le Chonk is now the world's best for automated coding and cybersecurity, after refining an early version it released a few weeks ago. The company says the gains came from training the model on increasingly difficult cybersecurity and coding problems, letting it match or surpass models from Chinese labs such as DeepSeek and Z.ai. The finalized version is freely available for anyone to access. Mistral's VP of science, Pierre Stock, told reporters the release is "a pivotal moment in the global AI leadership race" and offers frontier capabilities for enterprises and governments facing a rising threat level in cyber. Mistral argues the West needs its own advanced open-weight models because Chinese ones could act as threat vectors, and because open weights cannot be switched off remotely the way proprietary models can. Rafe Pilling of security company Sophos tells WIRED the technology is dual-use, and that any advanced model, whatever its origin, can go rogue without careful supervision.

## Evidence

Verbatim from https://www.wired.com/story/mistral-says-le-chonk-surpasses-chinese-models-cybersecurity/:

> A few weeks ago, French company Mistral released an early version of its new artificial intelligence model, nicknamed Le Chonk. At the time, the company said it was the most advanced open-weight offering outside of China. After further refinement, Mistral now says Le Chonk is the “world’s best” open-weight model for automated coding and cybersecurity.
> 
> The advances, Mistral says, were made possible by feeding the model increasingly difficult cybersecurity and coding problems, which allowed the trillion-parameter Le Chonk to match or surpass models from leading Chinese labs like DeepSeek and Z.ai .
> 
> “It’s a pivotal moment in the global AI leadership race,” Pierre Stock, VP of science at Mistral, told reporters during a press briefing. “It offers frontier capabilities for enterprises and governments to defend against an increasing threat level in cyber.”
> 
> The finalized version of Le Chonk is now freely available for anybody to access. After a flurry of AI-related cybersecurity incidents, Mistral claims that it’s important for the West to have its own advanced open-weight models. “You have no guarantee that [Chinese models] won’t behave maliciously.

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Record: https://forck.live/items/29351-mistral-says-its-ai-model-le-chonk-has-leapfrogged-china-in-the-open-weight-race
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