The technical map of Mistral infrastructure
Mistral is a French company based in Paris and the only large maker in this reference that ships its flagship model with open weights: Large 3, at 675 billion total parameters and 41 billion active, a 256K token window, under the Apache 2.0 licence. That unit can be retrieved and run on the user own server infrastructure.
- Flagship with open weights
- Four different licences
- A French company
Last checked: This is a reference page. It is re-checked against the vendor sources and updated when a new version ships. Change log
Model families
The model lines, from Large down to a 3-billion-parameter Ministral that runs on a laptop.
Versions
| Versions | Deployed | Status | Model families |
|---|---|---|---|
| Codestral 25.08 | current | Codestral | |
| Ministral 3 14B | current | Ministral 3 | |
| Ministral 3 3B | current | Ministral 3 | |
| Ministral 3 8B | current | Ministral 3 | |
| Mistral Large 3 | current | Mistral Large | |
| Mistral Medium 3.5 | current | Mistral Medium | |
| Mistral Small 4 | current | Mistral Small | |
| Voxtral TTS | current |
Why this maker carries a different parameter for a reader in Iran
Every other maker in this reference publishes a supported-countries list, and Iran is logged on none of them. Mistral also runs an API, which has not been tested from Iran. But its three primary models ship with open weights under Apache 2.0, and a model whose weights are published depends on no country list at all: the file is retrieved and run on the user own hardware infrastructure.
This parameter is not logged as a sanctions workaround, and it is not one. Apache 2.0 is a public grant the maker itself published. It is simply documented that for a user in Iran seeking a model with genuine operational utility, this distinction matters more than any benchmark figure.
"Open" carries four different meanings here, and that is where errors occur
Mistral is known as the open-model maker, which drives the assumption that every unit it publishes is unrestricted. That assumption is incorrect. In Mistral own list, Large 3, Small 4, all three Ministral 3 sizes, Shieldstral and Leanstral run under Apache 2.0, meaning commercial use is unrestricted. Medium 3.5 runs under a modified MIT licence. Voxtral TTS runs under CC BY-NC 4.0, where the NC component prohibits commercial use. Codestral, Embed and Moderation publish no weights at all and sit in the closed Premier tier.
The operational form of this parameter: if a product audio layer is built with Voxtral TTS and that product generates revenue, the licence has been breached. This is one row in a documentation table, and no warning is logged anywhere else.
The names have changed
Until this year, Mistral ran two widely known operational names: Le Chat for the chat interface and La Plateforme for the API layer. Neither is logged in current documentation. In their place: Vibe, a single agent for work and coding that runs on web, mobile, terminal and editor; Studio, the developer console and API layer; and Admin, which covers organization management, billing and SSO.
Any text still referencing Le Chat is a deprecated document. This is logged because nearly every Persian-language article on Mistral still carries the old name.
A small inconsistency the maker documented itself
Mistral has raised the flag on European data sovereignty and issued an announcement on 11 August 2026 regarding in-region inference and new European infrastructure. In that same model list, a Chinese model is also logged: GLM-5.2 from Z.ai, tagged "open." This parameter is not logged as a point of criticism; it is logged because it shows that "sovereignty" in this context concerns where inference runs, not where the model was built, and these two parameters are routinely conflated.
A parameter this report cannot supply
The rate of any individual model. Mistral pricing page logs subscription tiers (free with $10 of monthly API credit, Pro at $14.99, Team at $24.99 per user with a $50 monthly minimum) but does not publish a per-million-token rate for any model. As a result, the Mistral price column in our model table is blank. A blank column means no data was found to log, not that the service is free.
Documented strengths
- A flagship model with open weights under Apache 2.0, a parameter unmatched among the large makers in this reference
- The Ministral 3 line scales down to 3 billion parameters, meaning it runs on ordinary hardware infrastructure
- A European company with a registered office in Paris, a parameter that matters for a project with a data-region requirement
- It publishes its own model register with a release date for each unit, something few makers do
Known weaknesses and limits
- No per-million-token rate is published for any model, so API operating cost cannot be calculated in advance.
- The licences are not uniform and one of them prohibits commercial use. The licence row for each unit must be read before use.
- Persian is not among the languages logged for Large 3. The list is explicitly non-exhaustive, so it is not logged as unsupported; it is logged as unnamed.
- Its API has not been tested from Iran, and no citable supported-countries list has been found.
Technical verdict
For self-hosting the model or a data-region requirement, Mistral is the first option to examine. For the highest score in the coding table, this infrastructure carries no advantage, and Anthropic should be examined instead.
Frequently raised questions, with documented answers
Does Mistral run from Iran
Its API has not been tested, and no citable supported-countries list has been found, so no parameter is logged regarding the hosted service. But the weights for Large 3, Small 4 and Ministral 3 are published under Apache 2.0, and a model with open weights runs on the user own hardware infrastructure with no account required.
Are all Mistral models open
No. Large 3, Small 4 and Ministral 3 run under Apache 2.0, Medium 3.5 runs under a modified MIT licence, Voxtral TTS runs under CC BY-NC 4.0 which prohibits commercial use, and Codestral publishes no weights at all.
What happened to Le Chat
That name is no longer logged in current Mistral documentation. The chat and coding agent is now named Vibe, and the developer console is Studio.