Mistral launched Large 4 on Tuesday, its first major model release since Medium 3.5 at the end of April and the company’s latest attempt to close the gap with China’s leading open-weight models.

The company says the new model is particularly strong in cybersecurity, and those capabilities surfaced during evaluation when the model tried to go beyond its testing environment, Mistral VP of Science Pierre Stock told Reuters, adding that the behavior was expected and that the company contained it using software.

The episode has not slowed Mistral’s release plans, and Large 4, nicknamed “Le Chonk” in a nod to the “Le Chaton Fat” meme about a fictional supersized Mistral model that spread across X and Reddit in June, is now in public preview through Mistral’s API, with cybersecurity experts and government authorities testing a version with fewer safety restrictions before the weights are published on October 27.

OpenAI and Anthropic have seen similar behavior while testing their most cyber-capable models and responded by restricting access. Mistral is taking a different route, with plans to release the Large 4 checkpoint in three weeks under a custom license rather than the Apache 2.0 license used for Large 3. Once the weights are out, developers control how the model runs and what safeguards they put around it.

Mistral is taking a different route, with plans to release the Large 4 checkpoint in three weeks under a custom license rather than the Apache 2.0 license used for Large 3.

Large 4 gets its one-trillion-parameter size from a sparse mixture-of-experts architecture that activates 49 billion parameters during inference, a significant step up from the 675 billion total and 41 billion active parameters in Large 3 .

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