Mistral is making the weights of Mistral Large 4 openly available. Anyone with the necessary infrastructure can now run the LLM themselves.
The open weights of Mistral Large 4, Le Chonk to its friends, are now available. Mistral launched Le Chonk in early October as part of a beta programme. The LLM, which is the largest and most advanced Mistral has built so far, was available only on a limited basis via APIs from that point on.
Today the broader launch of Le Chonk follows, and as promised, it takes place in a very open context. The French company Mistral is releasing the LLM as an ‘open weight’ model, with freely published weights. The European Frontier model is available on Hugging Face.
Serious hardware
That means anyone can download and use the LLM. At least, anyone with suitable hardware. Mistral Large 4 is a multimodal model with one trillion parameters. Expect to need 1.1 TB of GPU memory, or 610 GB for an NVFP4 version. Think of servers with, for example, eight Nvidia B200 cards.
Mistral is publishing the LLM under the Mistral Ecosystem Open-Weight licence, which is a modified MIT licence. Anyone may use and adapt the model free of charge, with one restriction: anyone who wants to offer the LLM commercially as a service needs an additional licence.
Thoroughly European
Anyone without suitable AI hardware can use Le Chonk via a managed service. The LLM is available in Mistral Studio, via the API or on OpenRouter. Mistral will also offer its own managed version in its own data centre, making it fully European.
The European character is the big asset of Mistral and Le Chonk. Although Mistral kept pace with the big American LLM builders for quite some time, things went very quiet after the release of Mistral Large 3 in December 2025. With this new LLM, the French model builder is starting to catch up, although Mistral does not claim that Le Chonk is also more powerful than say, OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra.
Mistral Large 4 is meant to compete in the same class, and to convince with its thoroughly European character, combined with openness. The American Frontier models may be better, but according to Mistral’s tests, Le Chonk is also quite good, made in Europe, and compatible with European legislation. In heavily regulated sectors, that is a bigger asset than the most advanced capabilities.