Mistral Medium 3 launches at $0.4/$2 per million tokens, matching 90% of Claude 3.7 Sonnet performance

Mistral AI launched Mistral Medium 3 on May 7, 2025, priced at $0.4 per million input tokens and $2 per million output tokens. According to Mistral, the model performs at or above 90% of Claude Sonnet 3.7 on benchmarks while costing 8x less.

Pricing and deployment

Mistral Medium 3 is available immediately on Mistral La Plateforme and Amazon Sagemaker, with IBM WatsonX, NVIDIA NIM, Azure AI Foundry, and Google Cloud Vertex support coming soon. The model can be self-hosted on environments with four GPUs or more.

The company claims the model beats DeepSeek v3 on pricing for both API and self-deployed systems, though specific comparative figures were not provided.

Performance claims

According to Mistral's internal benchmarks, Medium 3 surpasses:

• Llama 4 Maverick (open source)
• Cohere Command A (enterprise model)
• Claude Sonnet 3.7 at 90% of performance in most categories

Mistral states the model "comes close to its very large and much slower competitors" in coding and STEM tasks, and that third-party human evaluations show "much better performance" in coding compared to larger models. Specific benchmark scores were not disclosed in the announcement.

Enterprise features

Mistral Medium 3 supports:

• Hybrid, on-premises, or in-VPC deployment
• Custom post-training and continuous pretraining
• Full fine-tuning capabilities
• Integration with enterprise knowledge bases

Beta customers in financial services, energy, and healthcare are testing the model for customer service, business process personalization, and complex dataset analysis, according to Mistral.

Model architecture

Mistral did not disclose parameter count, context window size, training data cutoff date, or detailed architecture specifications for Medium 3.

What this means

Mistral Medium 3 represents aggressive pricing in the enterprise AI model market, undercutting competitors by significant margins if the performance claims hold. At $0.4/$2 per million tokens with claimed near-parity to Claude Sonnet 3.7, this pricing could pressure other providers to reduce costs or differentiate on capabilities beyond benchmarks.

The emphasis on self-hosting and enterprise customization positions Medium 3 for organizations requiring on-premises deployment or extensive fine-tuning—use cases where API-only models face adoption barriers. Mistral's teaser about a "large" model launch in coming weeks suggests a three-tier lineup (Small, Medium, Large) to compete across market segments.

The lack of disclosed benchmark scores, parameter count, and context window makes independent verification of claims impossible at launch. Performance relative to Claude 3.7 and Llama 4 Maverick will need external validation.