Mistral's Trillion-Parameter 'Le Chonk' Lands at a Third of Claude's Price 🐱

Paris-based Mistral AI launched Mistral Large 4 on Tuesday, a 1-trillion-parameter AI model the firm has nicknamed "Le Chonk," with Chief Scientist Guillaume Lample writing on X that it is "at the frontier of open models, and by far the strongest open-weight model from the US or Europe." The system uses a mixture-of-experts design that activates 49 billion parameters per answer out of the trillion total, compared with 41 billion active out of 675 billion in Mistral Large 3, the previous release.

The "Le Chonk" name traces to a fictional meme model called "Le Chaton Fat" that fans invented in June on Reddit and X after Mistral rebranded its Le Chat assistant to Vibe, claiming fake specs including 30 trillion parameters and 1,000 meows per second. CEO Arthur Mensch played along, replying that the model was actually called "le gros chaton," French for "the big kitten," and Mistral later added a cartoon cat to the Vibe website. The company's launch post now lists the model as, "very officially," le Chonk.

Mistral sells "sovereign AI," models a country or company can own and run without sending data to outside firms. Saudi Arabia's state-backed HUMAIN signed a deal worth hundreds of millions of euros with Mistral in August on that premise. Mistral raised a €3 billion ($3.37 billion) Series D in September at a valuation above €21 billion ($23.6 billion), led by Samsung, and the company says Large 4 is the first roadmap milestone funded by that round.

Large 4 is priced at $1.36 per million input tokens and $4.18 per million output tokens, the roughly three-quarters-of-a-word text chunks that AI firms bill by. Claude Opus 5.5 charges $4 and $20, while GPT-6 Astra charges $10 and $50, putting Large 4 at about a third of Opus 5.5's input price and a fifth of its output price, and roughly a seventh and a twelfth of Astra's. Mistral's announcement benchmarks Large 4 mainly against Chinese open-weight models DeepSeek V4 Pro, Kimi K3, GLM-5.3, and Qwen3.8 Max, while Claude and GPT appear in only a handful of comparisons and the newest Claude, Opus 5.5, shows up only in a cybersecurity claim. In a blind human evaluation of coding quality by Surge AI, Mistral Large 4 ranked second of five models with 3.74 out of 5, behind Claude Opus 5's 4.22.