French AI startup Mistral has just unveiled its latest innovation—Mistral Medibum 3, an efficient and affordable large language model (LLM) that’s raising eyebrows across the industry. The model delivers performance on par with much pricier alternatives, making it a strong contender in today’s crowded AI market.
Affordable AI Power Without Compromise
Priced competitively at $0.40 per million input tokens and $20.80 per million output tokens through its API, Mistral Medium 3 promises premium results at a significantly lower cost than rivals like Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7. According to Mistral, the new model matches or exceeds 90% of Claude’s performance across widely used AI benchmarks.
Notably, Medium 3 also beats recent open-source releases such as Meta’s Llama 4 Maverick and Cohere’s Command R+ in head-to-head comparisons.
Behind the numbers, tokens represent chunks of data—think of a million tokens as roughly 750,000 words. For context, that’s more than the full text of “War and Peace” with room to spare.
Built for Flexibility and Real-World Use
Mistral says its model isn’t just efficient—it’s also highly deployable. Mistral Medium 3 can run on any cloud platform or be self-hosted, requiring only a four-GPU setup or more. This makes it ideal for businesses that want control over their infrastructure without compromising performance or price.
When it comes to deployment costs, Mistral Medium 3 reportedly outperforms budget-friendly options like DeepSeek v3 across both API and self-hosted settings.
Optimized for STEM and Business Use Cases
Designed with technical users in mind, Mistral Medium 3 shines in areas like software development, scientific reasoning, and data-intensive problem-solving. The company says it’s especially effective for clients in industries like finance, energy, and healthcare—where early adopters are already using it for tasks such as customer support, automation, and complex data analysis.
Available via Mistral’s API, the model can also be fine-tuned for enterprise-specific needs. Starting this week, it’s live on Amazon SageMaker and will soon appear on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry platforms.
Mistral Expands Offerings with Le Chat Enterprise
Alongside the new model, Mistral is also rolling out Le Chat Enterprise, a business-focused version of its chatbot platform. This upgraded tool allows companies to build AI agents and connect them to services like Gmail, Google Drive, and Microsoft SharePoint. Le Chat Enterprise also supports MCP—the emerging standard for integrating AI assistants with corporate software systems. Other major players like OpenAI and Google are also adopting MCP this year.
Previously in limited preview, Le Chat Enterprise is now available to the public, giving businesses a flexible interface for deploying Mistral’s AI capabilities internally.
A Growing Force in the AI Arms Race
Founded in 2023, Mistral has quickly established itself as a serious contender in the AI field. Backed by over €1.1 billion in funding from investors including General Catalyst, its customer roster features major European firms like BNP Paribas, AXA, and Mirakl.
This launch builds on the momentum from March’s release of Mistral Small 3.1 and teases a forthcoming larger model that could raise the bar even further.
As global demand for scalable, high-quality AI continues to soar, Mistral Medium 3 offers an enticing balance of cost-efficiency, technical depth, and deployment flexibility—making it a go-to option for businesses looking to harness cutting-edge AI without breaking the bank.
