Mistral Large 3 2512
Mistral released 2025-12-01
GPT-5.6 Luna is both better and cheaper.
It scores +36.4 higher and costs 40% less ($0.450/M against $0.750/M) on this workload — and it does everything this model does.
DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 is cheaper still (86% less) but drops no image, file input.
Our take
editorial — not a measurementMistral Large 3 at $0.50/$1.50 is startlingly cheap for a flagship — a third of Mistral Medium 3.5's price ($1.50/$7.50), which is the inversion you would not expect from the naming. Mistral positions Medium 3.5 as the agentic long-horizon model and Large 3 as the open-weight generalist, so the names describe lineage rather than capability ranking. Read the pricing page carefully before assuming Large is the premium option. Mistral also applies a flat 90% cached-input discount rather than per-model cache rates, which is simpler than everyone else's scheme.
Strengths
- $0.50/$1.50 — cheapest flagship-branded model here
- Described as open-weight by Mistral
- Flat 90% cached-input discount, simple to model
- 262k context, multimodal input
Weaknesses
- Naming misleads: Medium 3.5 costs 3x more and targets harder tasks
- No Hugging Face repo listed despite the open-weight claim
- Licence unverified
- No independent benchmark score captured
Reach for it when
- EU-hosted deployments with data-residency requirements
- Cheap general-purpose work
- Teams wanting simple cache economics
Avoid it if
- You need long-horizon agentic capability — Medium 3.5 is the target there
- You need verified open-weight licensing
Sources: mistral.aiopenrouter.ai
Every price dimension
| Input | $0.500/M |
|---|---|
| Output | $1.50/M |
| Cached input | $0.050/M |
Independent scores
| Intelligence | 15.9 |
|---|---|
| Coding | 20.1 |
| Agentic | 5.5 |
Sources are listed separately rather than averaged. Across the 62 models both have scored they correlate at r = 0.806 — close agreement overall, but four models rank very differently between them, and a blended score would hide exactly those.
Capability
| Context window | 262K |
|---|---|
| Input modes | text, image, file |
| Tool use | yes |
| Reasoning | no |
Provenance
| Price source | openrouter.ai |
|---|---|
| Fetched | 2026-08-24 |
| Quality data | verified |
Mistral Large 3 2512 is Mistral’s most capable model to date, featuring a sparse mixture-of-experts architecture with 41B active parameters (675B total), and released under the Apache 2.0 license.