Model comparison
Mistral Large 3 vs Muse Spark 1.3
Mistral against Meta, compared on context, price, and verified benchmark results.
Catalog record checked September 5, 2026Individual provider fields may changeEvidence confidence: Medium — see receipts below
Mistral
Mistral Large 3
Frontier · Open weights
Meta
Muse Spark 1.3
Frontier
| Specification | Mistral Large 3 | Muse Spark 1.3 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral | Meta |
| Tier | Frontier | Frontier |
| Context window | 262K | Winner: 1M |
| Max output | Winner: 262K | 131K |
| Input / 1M tokens | Winner: $0.50 | $1.25 |
| Output / 1M tokens | Winner: $1.50 | $4.25 |
| Weights | Open | Closed |
| Parameters | 675B total / 41B active (sparse MoE) | Meta frontier model |
| Reasoning levels | Not verifiedUnverified | low, medium, high |
| Modalities | text, image | text, image |
| License | Apache 2.0 | Not disclosedUnverified |
| API model id | mistral-large-3 | muse-spark-1.3 |
| Released | December 1, 2025 | September 2, 2026 |
| Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (2026-08-14) | 46 | Not verifiedUnverified |
| GPQA Diamond (2025-12-02) | 43.9 | Not verifiedUnverified |
| DeepSWE 1.1 (2026-09-02) | Not verifiedUnverified | 75.4 |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (2026-09-03) | Not verifiedUnverified | 88.8 |
Prices are USD per million tokens at standard rates, excluding batch and caching discounts. Bold indicates the better figure where one is objectively better. Values we could not confirm from the provider are shown as “Not verified” rather than estimated.
Benchmark receipts
- 2026-09-03: Meta launch table (transcribed by explainx.ai) (Vendor self-report; absent from the official tbench.ai leaderboard)Agentic terminal work: multi-step tasks executed in a sandboxed shell environment. Comparability: comparable with caveat — Scores across Terminal-Bench major versions (v1 vs v2) are NOT comparable; harness configuration (container, time limits) also shifts results.
- 2026-09-02: Meta launch table (Thinking mode: max — self-reported; not broadly available and NOT on the official Datacurve leaderboard)Agentic software engineering: pass@1 on real repo tasks with reported cost per completed task. Comparability: directly comparable
- 2026-08-14: Artificial AnalysisComposite index blending reasoning, knowledge, and coding evals into one 0–100 score. Comparability: directly comparable — AA occasionally rebaselines the index scale between snapshots — a score captured on one date is only comparable to same-snapshot scores (check measuredAt).
- 2025-12-02: Mistral — Introducing Mistral 3 (vendor, base model, 5-shot no CoT); independent review concursGraduate-level science reasoning: multiple-choice questions written by domain PhDs. Comparability: comparable with caveat — Small question pool: differences under ~2 points are within run-to-run noise. Chain-of-thought vs direct answering must match to compare.
Pricing tiers: Mistral Large 3: Mistral first-party API $0.50/$1.50 per MTok; cached input $0.05/MTok. Open weights (Apache 2.0), EU-hosted. · Muse Spark 1.3: $1.25/$4.25 per MTok on Meta's Model API (cached input $0.15); a $0.10/$0.20 'contributor' tier applies when your data is used for training. Third-party reports put list at $1.50/$7.50 from 2027-01-01 — confirm before long-term commits.
Mistral Large 3
Mistral Large 3 is Mistral's flagship — 262K-context, multimodal, Apache-2.0 open-weight at $0.50/$1.50.
Best for
- Open-weight deployments
- Multimodal EU-hosted inference
- Balanced frontier work
Watch out
Verify multimodal support and EU data-residency on your endpoint.
Muse Spark 1.3
Muse Spark 1.3 is Meta's September 2026 frontier refresh — a self-reported DeepSWE 1.1 field leader at $1.25/$4.25, with a 1M-token context aimed at autonomous agent workflows.
Best for
- Long-horizon coding agents
- Frontier quality below frontier pricing
- Meta ecosystem
Watch out
The headline 75.4% DeepSWE score comes from the 'max' thinking mode, which is not broadly available yet and is pending independent verification. The 131,072 output cap is per third-party API docs — Meta's own spec page does not publish it. Closed weights, unlike Muse Spark 1.1.
When the cheaper one wins
Mistral Large 3 is cheaper on output at $1.50 per million tokens against $4.25 for Muse Spark 1.3 — about 2.8×. Use the cheaper tier for classification, extraction, summarisation, and any task where the expensive model’s extra score does not change the accepted output. The expensive one only pays if your hardest task actually fails on the cheap tier. These are standard-tier API rates, excluding batch and cache discounts.
Run the model pickerEvidence confidence: Medium
How strong and complete the evidence behind this comparison is — not a prediction of which model is better.
- Pricing verified on both sides — Input and output rates are verified for both models.
- 4/5 core specs verified on both sides — Not published for at least one side: reasoning levels.
- No shared named benchmark — No benchmark has been measured on both models.
- Verified within the last 90 days — Newest catalog check was 6 days ago.
- Both models carry source citations — Each side has at least two catalog sources on record.
Source receipts
Each catalog figure was checked against the provider or an independent second source on the date shown.
- Mistral Large 3: Mistral docs — mistral-large-2512 (675B total / 41B active, 256K) (accessed 2026-09-05)
- Mistral Large 3: Mistral — Introducing Mistral 3 (sparse MoE parameters) (accessed 2026-09-05)
- Muse Spark 1.3: Meta — Introducing Muse Spark 1.3 (accessed 2026-09-03)
- Muse Spark 1.3: Meta developer — Muse Spark pricing ($1.25/$4.25) (accessed 2026-09-03)
- Muse Spark 1.3: VentureBeat — Muse Spark 1.3 best results need a config developers can't broadly use yet (accessed 2026-09-03)
- Muse Spark 1.3: HaiMaker — muse-spark-1.3 (131,072 max output tokens) (accessed 2026-09-05)
- Muse Spark 1.3: Promptfoo — Meta provider docs (muse-spark-1.3 max_tokens ceiling) (accessed 2026-09-05)
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Diving deeper on one model? Mistral Large 3 · Muse Spark 1.3
Common questions
Mistral Large 3 vs Muse Spark 1.3
Answered from the verified figures on this page rather than general guidance.
Is Mistral Large 3 or Muse Spark 1.3 cheaper for input?
Mistral Large 3 is cheaper at $0.50 per million input tokens, against $1.25 for Muse Spark 1.3 — roughly 2.5× the price. Output tokens usually dominate a real bill, so weigh the output rate more heavily than the input rate. These are base rates; Mistral Large 3 has tiered pricing: Mistral first-party API $0.50/$1.50 per MTok; cached input $0.05/MTok. Open weights (Apache 2.0), EU-hosted. Muse Spark 1.3 has tiered pricing: $1.25/$4.25 per MTok on Meta's Model API (cached input $0.15); a $0.10/$0.20 'contributor' tier applies when your data is used for training. Third-party reports put list at $1.50/$7.50 from 2027-01-01 — confirm before long-term commits.
Is Mistral Large 3 or Muse Spark 1.3 cheaper for output?
Mistral Large 3 is cheaper at $1.50 per million output tokens, against $4.25 for Muse Spark 1.3 — roughly 2.8× the price. Output tokens usually dominate a real bill, so weigh the output rate more heavily than the input rate. These are base rates; Mistral Large 3 has tiered pricing: Mistral first-party API $0.50/$1.50 per MTok; cached input $0.05/MTok. Open weights (Apache 2.0), EU-hosted. Muse Spark 1.3 has tiered pricing: $1.25/$4.25 per MTok on Meta's Model API (cached input $0.15); a $0.10/$0.20 'contributor' tier applies when your data is used for training. Third-party reports put list at $1.50/$7.50 from 2027-01-01 — confirm before long-term commits.
Which has the larger context window, Mistral Large 3 or Muse Spark 1.3?
Muse Spark 1.3 accepts 1M tokens against 262K for Mistral Large 3. This only matters if you routinely send very long documents or large codebases.
Should I use Mistral Large 3 or Muse Spark 1.3?
Both sit in the frontier tier, so the choice usually comes down to price and context rather than capability. Mistral Large 3 suits open-weight deployments; Muse Spark 1.3 suits long-horizon coding agents.
Can I self-host Mistral Large 3 or Muse Spark 1.3?
Mistral Large 3 publishes open weights, but self-hosting and third-party provider access depend on the licence, hardware, serving support, and availability. Muse Spark 1.3 is a closed model whose supported access paths are controlled by its provider.
Next step
Choosing between them
The verified figures that separate this pair, computed from the catalog rather than restated boilerplate.
- Input price: Mistral Large 3 costs $0.50 per 1M tokens versus $1.25 for Muse Spark 1.3 — a 2.5x difference at the headline tier.
- Context: Muse Spark 1.3 takes 1M against 262K for Mistral Large 3 — only decisive if your prompts approach the smaller window.
- Deployment: Mistral Large 3 publishes weights you can self-host; the other is API-only.
Choosing a harness rather than a model — Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code, Windsurf, or Lovable? Compare agentic harnesses · Latest releases.