Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Mistral launches Devstral, an open-source coding model

Ken Metral

Ken Metral

— 2 min read
Cosmico - Mistral launches Devstral, an open-source coding model
Credit: Mistral AI

AI startup Mistral has unveiled a powerful new addition to its model lineup: Devstral, an open-source AI model designed specifically for coding. Announced on Wednesday, Devstral is the result of a partnership with AI company All Hands AI, and it's available under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, making it suitable for commercial use without restrictions.

This move positions Mistral to compete more aggressively in the rapidly growing space of AI-powered development tools.

Built for Code, Open for Business

Unlike Mistral’s earlier coding model, Codestral, which came with licensing limitations, Devstral is fully open, enabling developers and companies to use it freely in their software projects. According to Mistral, Devstral outperforms leading open models like Google’s Gemma 3 27B and DeepSeek’s V3 on the SWE-Bench Verified benchmark — a key test for evaluating code generation quality and engineering performance.

The company says Devstral shines in practical software engineering tasks like exploring codebases, editing multiple files, and powering intelligent code agents. It's optimized to run on a single Nvidia RTX 4090 or even a Mac with 32GB of RAM, making it highly accessible for local deployment — a notable advantage in an industry where large models often require expensive cloud setups.

Key Features and Performance

  • Model Size: 24 billion parameters
  • Deployment: Local-friendly; works on high-end consumer hardware
  • Capabilities: Tool use, file editing, code agent integration
  • Access: Available via Mistral API and platforms like Hugging Face
  • Pricing: $0.10 per million input tokens, $0.30 per million output tokens

Devstral is designed to integrate with frameworks like OpenHands and SWE-Agent, which define how models interact with codebases and test cases — a hint at Mistral's ambitions to power more autonomous developer tools.

A Crowded but Growing Market

The release comes at a time when AI models for code are surging in popularity. Just last month, JetBrains launched its own open model, joining a wave of releases from Google, Windsurf, and OpenAI. Developers are rapidly adopting these tools: one recent survey found that 76% of developers had already integrated or planned to integrate AI tools into their workflows.

While enthusiasm is high, challenges remain. AI-generated code is still prone to bugs and security flaws due to limitations in reasoning and contextual understanding. Nonetheless, the potential productivity gains are keeping companies — and investors — deeply engaged.

What’s Next for Mistral?

Devstral is the third product launch for Mistral this month, following the debut of Mistral Medium 3, a general-purpose model, and Le Chat Enterprise, a business-focused chatbot platform. Mistral is also working on a larger agentic coding model aimed at more complex development tasks, expected to launch in the coming weeks.

Founded in 2023, Mistral has quickly become a standout in the AI field, backed by major investors including General Catalyst. With over €1.1 billion ($1.24 billion) raised, its customer base includes companies like BNP Paribas, AXA, and Mirakl.

As competition heats up in the coding AI space, Devstral’s combination of performance, openness, and efficiency could help Mistral carve out a significant niche — especially among developers and teams looking to deploy robust AI tools without vendor lock-in or licensing headaches.

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