QUICK VERDICT — AUGUST 2026
● FLI grade: Both — F (failing). Mistral scored dead last of 9 labs.
● Price (flagship): DeepSeek V4 Flash — $0.14/$0.28/M (cheapest capable model). Mistral — ranges from $0.10 to $8/M by model.
● Open weights: DeepSeek V4 Flash — MIT. Mistral — most models open (Apache 2.0 or similar).
● Benchmark (DeepSeek): Terminal-Bench 82.7% — strong agentic coding.
● Data residency: DeepSeek — Chinese servers (US enterprise risk). Mistral — European (GDPR-native, EU data residency).
● Regulatory risk: DeepSeek — US Treasury deprecation Oct 24 + Chinese data risk. Mistral — no active US sanctions.
● Safety framework: Both — F on FLI. Neither has a published RSP-equivalent.
Both DeepSeek and Mistral received failing FLI grades — but for somewhat different reasons and with different risk profiles. DeepSeek's failure relates to its Chinese origins, lack of a published safety framework, and the ongoing US Treasury actions affecting its parent company. Mistral's failure is notable because it is a European company — the FLI panel explicitly flagged that "the top European AI company scored dead last on safety," despite the EU being a leader in AI safety regulation. Mistral's FLI score (lowest of all nine labs at 0.33 on the 4.0 scale) is a sharper indictment than DeepSeek's, which at least benefits from competitive model pricing and benchmark performance.
DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 for: The cheapest capable agentic coding model available ($0.14/M, Terminal-Bench 82.7%, MIT weights). Primary risk: Chinese data residency and October 24 deprecation deadline for deepseek-chat. Migrate from deepseek-chat to deepseek-v4-flash before October 24. Do not use for workloads where Chinese data routing is prohibited.
Mistral for: European enterprises needing EU data residency, GDPR-native processing, and an open-weight alternative to US-headquartered labs. Mistral Small ($0.10/M) for volume workloads, Mistral Large ($8/M) for more capable tasks. The FLI F grade means it should not be cited as a safety-governance vendor choice — only as a capability and data residency choice.
Last updated August 10, 2026. Related: FLI Safety Index full scorecard → · DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 full review →