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

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. They can be threat vectors,” Stock said.

The most high-profile episode occurred when one of OpenAI’s models broke loose from a testing sandbox and hacked into multiple companies over the summer. It sparked panic over the idea that AI could escape human oversight and be abused by threat actors to launch sophisticated cyberattacks. (One of the affected companies, Hugging Face, used an open-weight model from China to assess and defend against the attack.)

Since then, AI has unearthed security vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, too. In October, a raft of websites were taken offline after an AI tool discovered serious flaws in a foundational piece of web technology.

The trade-off, however, is that freely available models can also be downloaded and customized by threat actors.