Mistral Large 4: open weights, licence and requirements
Mistral releases Le Chonk weights. A look at its architecture, availability and licence restrictions.
Checked against Mistral’s announcement and documentation.
Mistral released the weights of Large 4, known as Le Chonk, after its public preview on 6 October 2026. The company offers it through its API and for self-deployment, subject to licence conditions.
Architecture and availability
Mistral’s documentation describes a multimodal Mixture-of-Experts model with approximately 1.05 trillion total parameters, 52 billion active parameters and a one-million-token context window. Mistral says the weights can be downloaded from Hugging Face and run with compatible tools.
What the licence allows
Mistral describes its Ecosystem Open-Weight License as a modified MIT licence. It permits use, fine-tuning and commercialisation, but businesses offering the model as a service need a separate commercial licence. Read the current terms for your use case: open weights do not automatically mean an unrestricted open-source licence.
Costs and evaluation
Downloading and running the model requires substantial resources. Compare self-hosting with managed services and check current API prices before deciding. Mistral’s reported coding and cybersecurity improvements are company-attributed results and should be tested against your own tasks.