
Mistral Small 4 Review 2026: EU-Compliant, Open-Weight, $0.40/M Input
Mistral Small 4 ships as an Apache 2.0 open-weight model with 119B total parameters and only 6.5B active per token through a 128-expert Mixture-of-Experts architecture. It handles reasoning, vision, and coding through a single endpoint, replaces three separate Mistral models, and is priced at $0.40/M input tokens through the Mistral API. Mistral Small 4 Review 2026: The EU-Compliant Open-Weight Model Mistral Small 4 scores 28 on the AA Intelligence Index and outperforms GPT-OSS 120B on LiveCodeBench while generating outputs that are 20% shorter — a combination that matters directly for production cost. Released by Mistral AI, a Paris-based company, the model inherits EU data residency by default: API traffic stays inside the European Union without any additional configuration, which makes it the first credible option for GDPR-sensitive workloads that do not want to negotiate Standard Contractual Clauses with US cloud providers. Beyond compliance, the Apache 2.0 license removes all royalty and usage restrictions, meaning the same weights can be fine-tuned, redistributed, and embedded in commercial products without legal overhead. The model replaces Magistral for reasoning tasks, Pixtral for vision tasks, and Devstral for code tasks. It achieves 40% lower end-to-end latency and 3x higher throughput compared to Mistral Small 3, which makes it viable not just as a quality upgrade but as a direct cost reduction for teams already running Mistral in production. The model ID on the Mistral API is mistral-small-2603 and weights are available on Hugging Face at 242 GB in BF16. ...








