AI startup Mistral on Wednesday announced a new AI model focused on coding: Devstral.
Devstral, which Mistral says was developed in partnership with AI company All Hands AI, is openly available under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially without restriction. Mistral claims that Devstral outperforms other open models like Google’s Gemma 3 27B and Chinese AI lab DeepSeek’s V3 on SWE-Bench Verified, a benchmark measuring coding skills.
“Devstral excels at using tools to explore codebases, editing multiple files and power[ing] software engineering agents,” writes Mistral in a blog post provided to TechCrunch. “[I]t runs over code agent scaffolds such as OpenHands or SWE-Agent, which define the interface between the model and the test cases […] Devstral is light enough to run on a single [Nvidia] RTX 4090 or a Mac with 32GB RAM, making it an ideal choice for local deployment and on-device use.”
Devstral arrives as AI coding assistants — and the models powering them — grow increasingly popular. Just last month, JetBrains, the company behind a range of popular app development tools, released its first “open” AI model for coding. In recent months, AI outfits including Google, Windsurf, and OpenAI have also unveiled models, both openly available and proprietary, optimized for programming tasks.
AI models still struggle to code quality software — code-generating AI tends to introduce security vulnerabilities and errors, owing to weaknesses in areas like the ability to understand programming logic. Yet their promise to boost coding productivity is pushing companies — and developers — to rapidly adopt them. One recent poll found that 76% of devs used or were planning to use AI tools in their development processes last year.
Mistral previously waded into the assistive programming space with Codestral, a generative model for code. But Codestral wasn’t released under a license that permitted devs to use the model for commercial applications; its license explicitly banned “any internal usage by employees in the context of [a] company’s business activities.”
Devstral, which Mistral is calling a “research preview,” can be downloaded from AI development platforms, including Hugging Face, and also tapped through Mistral’s API. It’s priced at $0.1 per million input tokens and $0.3 per million output tokens, tokens being the raw bits of data that AI models work with. (A million tokens is equivalent to about 750,000 words, or roughly 163,000 words longer than “War and Peace.”)
Mistral says it’s “hard at work building a larger agentic coding model that will be available in the coming weeks.” Devstral isn’t a small model per se, but it’s on the smaller side at 24 billion parameters. (Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters.)
Mistral, founded in 2023, is a frontier model lab, aiming to build a range of AI-powered services, including a chatbot platform, Le Chat, and mobile apps. It’s backed by VCs, including General Catalyst, and has raised over €1.1 billion (roughly $1.24 billion) to date. Mistral’s customers include BNP Paribas, AXA, and Mirakl.
Devstral is Mistral’s third product launch this month. A few weeks ago, Mistral launched Mistral Medium 3, an efficient general-purpose model. Around the same time, the company rolled out Le Chat Enterprise, a corporate-focused chatbot service that offers tools like an AI “agent” builder and integrates Mistral’s models with third-party services like Gmail, Google Drive, and SharePoint.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/
