French AI startup Mistral AI has unveiled a new open-weight artificial intelligence model that it claims outperforms competing models developed outside China, strengthening Europe’s position in the increasingly competitive AI industry.

The model, called Mistral Large 4 (ML4) and nicknamed “Le Chonk,” contains 1 trillion parameters. Mistral said it is expected to rank among the world’s leading open-weight models based on combined benchmark results, although its coding performance remains behind some other advanced AI systems.

The launch comes as Western AI developers work to close the gap with Chinese competitors and expand their presence in a market dominated by increasingly powerful models.

ML4 is currently available through Mistral Studio’s API to developers, cybersecurity professionals, and government authorities during a limited preview period. The company plans to release the model’s weights publicly on October 27, allowing developers to access and adapt the technology.

Mistral said the model was trained from scratch over two months using 4,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs at its European data centres. It supports more than 160 languages, including every official language of the European Union.

Cybersecurity is a key focus of the new model. Mistral believes open-weight AI systems can help businesses and governments strengthen their defences against cyber threats, including attacks involving the misuse of closed AI models.

“The cyber defence capabilities will enable enterprises and governments to defend themselves against threat actors that are jailbreaking closed models to perform cyber attacks,” said Guillaume Lample, Mistral’s co-founder and chief scientist.

Lample added that the model’s capabilities could improve as the company expands its training infrastructure following its latest funding round. Mistral also noted that the reinforcement learning phase of ML4’s training had not been completed at launch.

The announcement follows Mistral’s €3 billion ($3.4 billion) Series D funding round last month, led by Samsung Electronics. The investment valued the company at more than €21 billion, with Mistral describing the fundraising as the largest equity round ever completed by a European technology company.

The funding builds on an earlier $830 million debt raise intended to finance a new data centre outside Paris. Mistral is also developing another facility in Sweden and aims to reach a combined computing capacity of 200 megawatts across its European operations by the end of 2027.

The launch also comes one day after US startup Reflection AI, backed by Nvidia, introduced its first open-weight model, according to CNBC.

As competition intensifies between American, Chinese, and European developers, Mistral is seeking to establish itself as a leading provider of advanced AI technology. The performance of ML4 in independent evaluations and real-world applications will help determine whether it can deliver on the company’s claims.