Model comparison

Mistral Large 3 vs Qwen 3.8 Max

Mistral against Qwen, compared on context, price, and verified benchmark results.

Catalog record checked September 5, 2026Individual provider fields may changeEvidence confidence: High — see receipts below

Mistral

Mistral Large 3

Frontier · Open weights

Qwen

Qwen 3.8 Max

Frontier · Open weights

AI model capability comparison
Specification	Mistral Large 3	Qwen 3.8 Max
Provider	Mistral	Qwen
Tier	Frontier	Frontier
Context window	262K	Winner: 991K
Max output	Winner: 262K	131K
Input / 1M tokens	Winner: $0.50	$2
Output / 1M tokens	Winner: $1.50	$6
Weights	Open	Open
Parameters	675B total / 41B active (sparse MoE)	2.4T total / 95B active (MoE)
Reasoning levels	Not verifiedUnverified	low, high, max
Modalities	text, image	text, image, video
License	Apache 2.0	Not disclosedUnverified
API model id	mistral-large-3	qwen3.8-max
Released	December 1, 2025	August 3, 2026
Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (2026-08-14)	46	Winner: 58
GPQA Diamond (2025-12-02)	43.9	Winner: 92.6
Terminal-Bench 2.1 (2026-08-03)	Not verifiedUnverified	86.6
Humanity's Last Exam (2026-08-14)	Not verifiedUnverified	56.2
SWE-bench Verified (2026-09-01)	Not verifiedUnverified	85.6

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

2026-09-01: vals.ai SWE-bench Verified leaderboard (independent, mini-swe-agent bash-only); not published by Qwen (official used SWE-bench Pro 67.7)Real GitHub issue resolution: does the model's patch pass the hidden tests. Comparability: comparable with caveat — Post-audit vendor claims and pre-audit scores sit on different task trust levels; scaffolding (agent harness, compute budget) also dominates results. Never aggregate across scaffolds.
2026-08-14: Z.ai GLM-5.3 blog (independent Z.ai-run, with tools; Qwen official no-tools 43.6 — both preserved)Frontier-knowledge ceiling: extremely hard multi-domain questions written to be near-impossible without deep expertise. Comparability: comparable with caveat — Subset/tool configurations (text-only vs with-tools) differ between vendors and materially change scores; must match configuration to compare.
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).
2026-08-03: Qwen official blog (vendor-run table)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.
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. · Qwen 3.8 Max: $2/$6 per MTok (Alibaba Cloud Model Studio). Weights announced open, verify they have dropped.

FrontierOpen weightsRecord checked September 5, 2026

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.

FrontierOpen weightsRecord checked September 3, 2026

Qwen 3.8 Max

Qwen 3.8 Max is Alibaba's flagship — 2.4T MoE with 1M-class context, near frontier on the Intelligence Index.

Best for

Open-weight frontier work
Long-context
Multimodal

Watch out

Open weights dropped 2026-08-12 under a custom (non-Apache) licence with vision and 1M-context stripped from the open checkpoint — the open checkpoint is not the full API model. Verify the licence before commercial use.

When the cheaper one wins

Mistral Large 3 is cheaper on output at $1.50 per million tokens against $6 for Qwen 3.8 Max — about 4.0×. 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.

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Evidence confidence: High

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.
2 shared named benchmarks with differing scores — Measured on: Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, GPQA Diamond.
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)
Qwen 3.8 Max: Qwen — Qwen 3.8 Max (accessed 2026-08-29)
Qwen 3.8 Max: Alibaba Cloud Model Studio (accessed 2026-08-29)

Related comparisons

Diving deeper on one model? Mistral Large 3 · Qwen 3.8 Max

Common questions

Mistral Large 3 vs Qwen 3.8 Max

Answered from the verified figures on this page rather than general guidance.

Is Mistral Large 3 or Qwen 3.8 Max cheaper for input?

Mistral Large 3 is cheaper at $0.50 per million input tokens, against $2 for Qwen 3.8 Max — roughly 4.0× 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. Qwen 3.8 Max has tiered pricing: $2/$6 per MTok (Alibaba Cloud Model Studio). Weights announced open, verify they have dropped.

Is Mistral Large 3 or Qwen 3.8 Max cheaper for output?

Mistral Large 3 is cheaper at $1.50 per million output tokens, against $6 for Qwen 3.8 Max — roughly 4.0× 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. Qwen 3.8 Max has tiered pricing: $2/$6 per MTok (Alibaba Cloud Model Studio). Weights announced open, verify they have dropped.

Which has the larger context window, Mistral Large 3 or Qwen 3.8 Max?

Qwen 3.8 Max accepts 991K 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 Qwen 3.8 Max?

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; Qwen 3.8 Max suits open-weight frontier work.

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 $2 for Qwen 3.8 Max — a 4x difference at the headline tier.
Context: Qwen 3.8 Max takes 991K against 262K for Mistral Large 3 — only decisive if your prompts approach the smaller window.
Measured capability: Qwen 3.8 Max leads Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index 58 to 46 (measured 2026-08-14).

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