Ministral 3

Claims and evidence

• Released 2 December 2025 ● Primary source[1] [3]December 2 (2025)

• Status Available ● Primary source[4]Generalist models [5]

• Successor of Ministral EditorialEditorial link along the Ministral line: the announcement does not name a predecessor; the models overview lists Ministral 3 3B and 8B as the alternatives for the retired Ministral 3B and 8B of October 2024. ● Primary source[1] [4]Deprecated & retired models table, Alternative column
• Derived from (distillation) Mistral Small 3.1The paper says all Ministral 3 models descend from Mistral Small 3.1 through Cascade Distillation: iterative pruning plus continued pretraining with logit distillation from the parent. The vision encoder is copied from Mistral Small 3.1 Base. ● Primary source[2]section 1 Introduction; Figure 1

• Change · Size Adds a 14B size alongside 3B and 8B.Compared with Ministral ● Primary source[1]
• Change · Reasoning Each size comes with a separate reasoning checkpoint next to the base and instruct checkpoints.Compared with Ministral ● Primary source[1]
• Change · Modality All checkpoints accept image input through a 410M-parameter vision encoder copied from Mistral Small 3.1 Base.Compared with Ministral ● Primary source[2]
• Change · Training data Trained by pruning and distilling from Mistral Small 3.1 on between 1 and 3 trillion tokens, according to the paper.Compared with Ministral ● Primary source[2]

• Input text, image ● Primary source[6]Modalities [7]Modalities [8]Modalities [1]Ministral 3 section
• Output text ● Primary source[6]Modalities [7]Modalities [8]Modalities
• Feature Function calling ● Primary source[6]Features: Function Calling [7]Features: Function Calling [8]Features: Function Calling
• Open weights YesBase, Instruct and Reasoning weights for all three sizes under Apache 2.0. ● Primary source[5] [1]
• Context window 256k tokensThe paper gives context lengths up to 256k tokens, and 128k for the reasoning checkpoints. ● Primary source[6]Context [7]Context [8]Context [2]section 1 Introduction
• Access API, Open-weights download, cloud partner ● Primary source[1]Available Today [5]

Lineage

Variants

Related AI Radar coverage

AI Radar coverage starts in June 2026; no coverage linked yet.

All model releases from Mistral AI on AI Radar →