Side-by-side comparison of DeepSeek R1 (DeepSeek · China) and Mistral Medium 3.5 (Mistral AI · France) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. DeepSeek R1 is rated conditional; Mistral Medium 3.5 is EU-ready. They part ways on licence: DeepSeek R1 is "MIT", Mistral Medium 3.5 is "Modified MIT".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | Conditional Frontier reasoning model at o1-class performance. MIT licence makes weights legally clean. Same Chinese-origin alignment/supply-chain considerations as DeepSeek V3. Distilled Qwen/Llama versions inherit their base licence. | EU-ready Per Mistral's published license, Mistral Medium 3.5 ships under a Modified MIT License: vanilla-MIT terms for independent developers, startups and most enterprises, with a revenue-threshold carve-out that routes large companies back to a paid commercial agreement. Paris-headquartered vendor with EU jurisdiction end to end and a 256k-token context. Training-data composition is not published in the model card — usual caveat for high-assurance public-sector deployments. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-15 | 2026-05-03 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | MIT | Modified MIT |
| Commercial use | Yes | Permitted (revenue cap) |
| Training data | Undisclosed | Undisclosed |
| Origin | China | EU (France) |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 27/100 | — |
| Speed | — | — |
| Blended price | $2.36/M | — |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.