Unfortunately Mistral is not close to the frontier. Their last release Mistral Medium 3.5 128B is near the performance[0] of QWEN-3.6-27B, a much smaller model that was released earlier.

It's good that they exist, and I hope they catch up, but if you don't have origin constraints for your use case I don't see why you would chose their models today.

[0]: On the only benchmark they both published performance results - SWE-bench Verified -they are within a margin of error Mistral 77.6 vs Qwen 77.2.

Within Spec Driven Development style coding for me Claude Sonnet 4.5 was the game changer and Mistral is I believe at that level already. GLM is allegedly also on par with even some of the Opus models, so if the US vendors would vanish tomorrow, there would be alternatives. Would I miss Opus 4.8 and the Claude Code harness? of course I would! But the world wouldn't stop.

What I am trying to get at is that the frontier is great, but you can be fine with less as well.