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Mistral OCR 4

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Why This Matters

Mistral OCR 4 advances optical character recognition with enhanced features like bounding boxes, block classification, and confidence scores, supporting 170 languages and optimized for self-hosted deployment. Its superior performance and detailed output capabilities make it a valuable tool for enterprise search, RAG, and domain-specific pipelines, while maintaining data privacy and control. This release signifies a significant step forward in multilingual, high-precision OCR technology for both industry and consumers.

Key Takeaways

Today, we're releasing Mistral OCR 4, featuring bounding boxes, block classification, and inline confidence scores alongside extracted text. The model supports 170 languages across 10 language groups, runs in a single container for fully self-hosted deployments, and serves as an ingestion component for enterprise search, RAG, and domain-specific retrieval pipelines . OCR 4 is a small, focused model, and this post covers what's new, how it performs on public and internal benchmarks, the known limitations of those benchmarks, and guidance on when to use the model API versus Document AI.

Highlights

Breakthrough performance. Independent annotators prefer OCR 4 over every leading OCR and document-AI system tested, with win rates averaging 72%, alongside the top overall score on OlmOCRBench (85.20). See Benchmarks below for methodology and known scoring limitations.

Segmentation, not just text. Alongside the extracted text, OCR 4 returns bounding boxes, typed-block classification (titles, tables, equations, signatures, and more), and inline confidence scores. Bounding boxes, our most-requested capability, localize text for in-context highlighting and reliable data pipelines. At the same time, block types and confidence scores drive source-grounded citations, redactions, and human-in-the-loop verification.

Integrated with Mistral Search Toolkit (public preview). OCR 4 is an ingestion component of Search Toolkit , Mistral's open-source, composable search framework, announced at the AI Now Summit. Its structured output supplies citation-ready inputs to the toolkit's ingestion, retrieval, and evaluation workflow for RAG and enterprise search.

Multilingual coverage. Support for 170 languages across 10 language groups, with measurable gains on rare and low-resource languages where several competing systems degrade.

Run on your own infrastructure. OCR 4 is compact enough to deploy on a single container, keeping document data in your environment for residency, sovereignty, and compliance, while supporting cost-efficient, high-throughput batch processing. Self-managed deployment is available to enterprise customers.

Overview

Mistral OCR 4 extracts and structures content from a wide range of documents. Where previous generations focused on converting a page into clean text and tables, OCR 4 returns a structured representation of the document. Each block is localized with a bounding box, classified by type, and inline confidence scores are generated per-page and per-word. Downstream systems, therefore, have access not only to what the document says but also to where each element sits, what role it plays, and how confident the model is in each region.

This structure supports several downstream workloads:

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