Start your day with intelligence. Get The OODA Daily Pulse.
French AI startup Mistral is releasing a new AI model, Mistral Medium 3, that’s focused on efficiency without compromising performance. Available in Mistral’s API priced at $0.40 per million input tokens and $2 per million output tokens, Mistral Medium 3 performs “at or above” 90% of Anthropic’s costlier Claude Sonnet 3.7 model on “benchmarks across the board,” claims Mistral. It also surpasses recent open models, including Meta’s Llama 4 Maverick and Cohere’s Command A, on popular AI performance evaluations. Tokens are the raw bits of data models work with, with a million tokens equivalent to about 750,000 words (roughly 163,000 words longer than “War and Peace”). “Mistral Medium 3 can […] be deployed on any cloud, including self-hosted environments of four GPUs and above,” explained Mistral in a blog post sent to TechCrunch. “On pricing, the model beats cost leaders such as DeepSeek v3, both in API and self-deployed systems.” Mistral, founded in 2023, is a frontier model lab, aiming to build a range of AI-powered services, including a chatbot platform, Le Chat, and mobile apps. It’s backed by VCs including General Catalyst, and has raised over €1.1 billion (roughly $1.24 billion) to date. Mistral’s customers include BNP Paribas, AXA, and Mirakl.