French Startup Mistral Launches Magistral, Europe’s First AI Reasoning Model

The French startup Mistral launched its first AI reasoning model on Tuesday, marking the first of its kind developed in Europe. The new AI system, called Magistral, is positioned to compete with models such as DeepSeek-R1, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s o3.

According to the official announcement, Magistral comes in two variants: Magistral Small—24B parameter open-source— and Magistral Medium—a more powerful version designed for enterprise use. Mistral’s reasoning model includes multilingual capabilities and introduces two new modes in Le Chat:  Flash Answers and Think mode.

“Today, we’re excited to announce our latest contribution to AI research with Magistral — our first reasoning model,” wrote Mistral on its website. “Released in both open and enterprise versions, Magistral is designed to think things through — in ways familiar to us — while bringing expertise across professional domains, transparent reasoning that you can follow and verify, along with deep multilingual flexibility.”

Magistral can assist users with coding projects by generating plans, backend architecture, frontend design, and data engineering workflows. The company also shared a video demonstrating the model’s coding capabilities.

Mistral offered benchmark test results as well, comparing Magistral to other models such as DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1—which was recently updated—, achieving strong scores.  Mistral also shared a paper with more technical details of the new technology.

Mistral is offering a preview version of its new reasoning model in Le Chat or La Plateforme via API. Magistral Small is available for download on Hugging Face, and Magistral Medium is hosted on Amazon SageMaker.

According to Reuters, Mistral is “Europe’s best shot” at developing competitive AI models in the region, but hasn’t advanced as fast as some of its competitors in China or the United States.

The French startup has had the president Emmanuel Macron’s support and was recently valued at $6.2 billion by venture capitalists. With the launch of Magistral, it keeps developing its growing potential to compete against other tech giants in the global AI race.