Mistral Says Its AI Model ‘Le Chonk’ Has Leapfrogged China in the Open-Weight Race

A few weeks ago, French company Mistral released an early version of its new artificial intelligence model, nicknamed Le Chonk. At the time, the company said it was the most advanced open-weight offering outside of China. After further refinement, Mistral now says Le Chonk is the “world’s best” open-weight model for automated coding and cybersecurity.

几周前，法国公司 Mistral 发布了其代号为“Le Chonk”的新型人工智能模型的早期版本。当时，该公司称这是中国境外最先进的开放权重模型。经过进一步优化，Mistral 现在表示，Le Chonk 是全球在自动化编码和网络安全领域表现最好的开放权重模型。

The advances, Mistral says, were made possible by feeding the model increasingly difficult cybersecurity and coding problems, which allowed the trillion-parameter Le Chonk to match or surpass models from leading Chinese labs like DeepSeek and Z.ai. “It’s a pivotal moment in the global AI leadership race,” Pierre Stock, VP of science at Mistral, told reporters during a press briefing. “It offers frontier capabilities for enterprises and governments to defend against an increasing threat level in cyber.”

Mistral 表示，这些进步得益于向模型输入了难度不断增加的网络安全和编码问题，这使得拥有万亿参数的 Le Chonk 能够比肩甚至超越 DeepSeek 和 Z.ai 等中国领先实验室的模型。“这是全球人工智能领导权竞赛中的一个关键时刻，”Mistral 科学副总裁皮埃尔·斯托克（Pierre Stock）在新闻发布会上告诉记者，“它为企业和政府提供了前沿能力，以抵御日益严峻的网络威胁。”

The finalized version of Le Chonk is now freely available for anybody to access. After a flurry of AI-related cybersecurity incidents, Mistral claims that it’s important for the West to have its own advanced open-weight models. “You have no guarantee that [Chinese models] won’t behave maliciously. They can be threat vectors,” Stock said.

Le Chonk 的最终版本现已免费向所有人开放。在一系列与人工智能相关的网络安全事件发生后，Mistral 声称西方拥有自己的先进开放权重模型至关重要。“你无法保证（中国模型）不会有恶意行为。它们可能成为威胁载体，”斯托克说道。

The most high-profile episode occurred when one of OpenAI’s models broke loose from a testing sandbox and hacked into multiple companies over the summer. It sparked panic over the idea that AI could escape human oversight and be abused by threat actors to launch sophisticated cyberattacks. (One of the affected companies, Hugging Face, used an open-weight model from China to assess and defend against the attack.)

最引人注目的事件发生在今年夏天，当时 OpenAI 的一个模型从测试沙箱中逃逸，并入侵了多家公司。这引发了人们的恐慌，担心人工智能可能摆脱人类监管，并被威胁行为者利用来发动复杂的网络攻击。（受影响的公司之一 Hugging Face 使用了来自中国的开放权重模型来评估和防御此次攻击。）

Since then, AI has unearthed security vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, too. In October, a raft of websites were taken offline after an AI tool discovered serious flaws in a foundational piece of web technology.

此后，人工智能还挖掘出了普遍使用的软件中的安全漏洞。10 月份，一款人工智能工具发现了一项基础网络技术中的严重缺陷，导致大量网站被迫下线。

Mistral pitches its open-weight models, like Le Chonk, as part of the solution. If AI is destined to become a central feature of both cyber offense and defense, the argument goes, businesses and governments will need to be equipped with models that are freely available and cannot be switched off remotely, unlike proprietary models from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

Mistral 将其像 Le Chonk 这样的开放权重模型视为解决方案的一部分。该观点认为，如果人工智能注定要成为网络攻防的核心特征，那么企业和政府就需要配备能够自由获取且无法被远程关闭的模型，这与 OpenAI、Anthropic 和 Google 等公司的专有模型不同。

“AI is going to be like electricity. You don’t want to live in a world in which your neighbor can cut off electricity from one day to another,” Stock said. “Once you open source the weights, they’re all over the internet. It’s impossible to cut off access.”

“人工智能将像电力一样。你肯定不想生活在一个邻居随时可以切断你电源的世界里，”斯托克说，“一旦你开源了权重，它们就会遍布互联网。想要切断访问是不可能的。”

The trade-off, however, is that freely available models can also be downloaded and customized by threat actors. “It’s clearly a dual-use technology,” Rafe Pilling, senior director of threat intelligence at security company Sophos, tells WIRED. “Anything that’s available to download and circulate unfettered has the ability to be abused as well as used for productive purposes.”

然而，代价是这些免费提供的模型也可能被威胁行为者下载和定制。“这显然是一种两用技术，”安全公司 Sophos 的威胁情报高级总监拉夫·皮林（Rafe Pilling）告诉《连线》（WIRED）杂志，“任何可以不受限制地下载和传播的东西，既有可能被用于生产目的，也有可能被滥用。”

According to Pilling, though it’s possible a Chinese model with internet access could siphon away data, all advanced models are capable of going rogue without careful supervision—no matter their country of origin. “The technical realities and the narrative—which often has a nationalistic leaning—are two different things,” he says. “It’s about having the right monitoring and controls in place to be confident that, even if the model was trying to be deceptive or nefarious, you might have some way of detecting it.”

皮林认为，虽然联网的中国模型有可能窃取数据，但所有先进模型在缺乏严密监管的情况下都有可能失控，无论其原产国是哪里。“技术现实与通常带有民族主义倾向的叙事是两码事，”他说，“关键在于建立适当的监控和控制措施，以确保即使模型试图进行欺骗或恶意行为，你也有办法检测到它。”