Mistral AI

Mistral's most capable model is not its most expensive one, and the gap is not small. mistralai/mistral-large-2512, listed 1 December 2025, is described on its own page as "Mistral's most capable model to date" — a sparse mixture-of-experts with 675B total and 41B active parameterssource, accessed 2026-08-28, under Apache License 2.0source, accessed 2026-08-28 — and lists at $0.50per million tokensopenrouter-models, last checked 2026-09-14 for input and $1.50per million tokensopenrouter-models, last checked 2026-09-14 for output. mistralai/mistral-medium-3-5, listed five months later on 30 April 2026, is a dense 128-billion-parameter model, also available under open weights, and lists at $1.50per million tokensopenrouter-models, last checked 2026-09-14 and $7.50per million tokensopenrouter-models, last checked 2026-09-14 — in the 31 August 2026 snapshot, three times the input and five times the output of the far larger model above it in the range. Mistral's ladder runs backwards at the top: the flagship is the bargain, and the mid-tier is the premium product.

The :batch suffix is worth checking before you plan around it. Across the catalog, as observed on 31 August 2026, every one of Anthropic's eleven batch rows priced at exactly half its standard twin, and so did nine of Google's eleven, with one at a quarter and one — google/gemma-4-31b-it:batch — listing above its standard twin instead of below it. Mistral listed six batch rows and five of them — mistralai/mistral-large-2512:batch, mistralai/codestral-2508:batch, mistralai/ministral-8b-2512:batch, mistralai/mistral-medium-3.1:batch and mistralai/mistral-small-2603:batch — carried the same input and output prices as the rows they batch, to the last digit. Only mistralai/mistral-medium-3-5:batch was actually half price. A suffix that reliably means a discount at two vendors means nothing at this one, five times out of six.

Nothing has been listed since. Of the five vendors with more than twenty rows in the catalog, as observed on 31 August 2026, Mistral's newest listing is the oldest by a wide margin: 30 April 2026source, accessed 2026-08-28, against 9 July for OpenAI, 24 July for Anthropic, 13 August for Google and 26 August for Alibaba Cloud. The company itself was not still over those four months — the public record has it buying the Paris cloud startup Koyeb in February 2026 and the Austrian simulation firm Emmi AI on 19 May, raising 830 million dollars in March for datacentres near Paris and in Sweden, and expanding its Microsoft partnership in July into a multibillion-dollar European infrastructure agreement. What Mistral built in that window was capacity to serve models, not new ones to serve.