# The Decoder — Paris-based Mistral releases "Le Chonk," a strong coding model that still trails China overall

- Company: The Decoder (the-decoder.com)
- Announced: 2026-10-29T15:25:27+00:00
- Category: open-weight-release
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: yes
- Group: models
- Source: https://the-decoder.com/paris-based-mistral-releases-le-chonk-a-strong-coding-model-that-still-trails-china-overall/
- Record: https://forck.live/items/29390-paris-based-mistral-releases-le-chonk-a-strong-coding-model-that-still-trails
- Subject: Reporting
- Open weights: yes
- Models affected: Mistral Large 4, Large 4, Le Chonk, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, GLM-5.3, Kimi K3, Kimi K3.1 Pro, MiMo-V2.6-Pro, Claude Opus 5.5, GLM-5.3 Flash
- License: modified MIT license
- Pricing: $0.70 per million input tokens and $2.10 per million output tokens; during the preview, the list price was $1.36 and $4.18; Mistral cut it to $0.68 and $2.09 for two weeks at launch

Mistral has put the weights of Mistral Large 4, nicknamed "Le Chonk," on Hugging Face three weeks after its public preview, under a modified MIT license. The model has about one trillion parameters in total, with 52 billion active per step, and takes text and images as input while outputting text and code. Mistral says the model beats its open rivals at coding, and after three more weeks of reinforcement learning its Terminal-Bench 4.0 score rose from 28 to 41 percent, just ahead of GLM-5.3 at 40 percent. On Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index the final version scores 26 points, one point above the preview and above the 23-point median for open models of similar size, but behind Chinese open models such as DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and GLM-5.3. Mistral calls Large 4 the leading open model for cyber defense, yet its own chart shows DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at 57 percent and MiMo-V2.6-Pro at 56 percent ahead of its 51 percent on the Cyber Index. Through the API it costs $0.70 per million input tokens and $2.10 per million output tokens, down from the preview list price of $1.36 and $4.18, and companies offering it as a commercial cloud service need a separate license from Mistral.

## Evidence

Verbatim from https://the-decoder.com/paris-based-mistral-releases-le-chonk-a-strong-coding-model-that-still-trails-china-overall/:

> Mistral has released the weights for Large 4 ("Le Chonk"). The model has about one trillion parameters, 52 billion of them active, and can run on your own hardware under a modified MIT license.
> 
> In independent benchmarks, the model does well on coding. On Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index, though, it scores 26 points, behind open Chinese models like DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and GLM-5.3 and far behind the leading systems from Anthropic and Google.
> 
> Its strengths are speed at 161 tokens per second, lower API prices, and a 96.6 percent refusal rate for harmful cyber requests.
> 
> Mistral has released the weights for Mistral Large 4, its largest model yet. The company says the model beats its open rivals at coding. In the first independent test, it turns out to be fast and fairly cheap, but it trails Chinese models in the overall rankings.
> 
> Three weeks after the public preview , Mistral has put the Large 4 weights on Hugging Face . The model's nickname is "Le Chonk." It takes text and images as input and outputs text and code. It has about one trillion parameters in total, with 52 billion active per step. Running it yourself takes a lot of hardware.

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Record: https://forck.live/items/29390-paris-based-mistral-releases-le-chonk-a-strong-coding-model-that-still-trails
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