Mistral released its trillion-parameter model as open weights, but running it yourself takes eight top-end GPUs
On 29th Oct'26 Mistral published the weights of Mistral Large 4, a model of about one trillion parameters that reads text and images, after a preview earlier in October. It ships under Mistral's own open-weight licence, a modified MIT licence that allows commercial use and fine-tuning but requires a separate commercial licence from anyone offering the model as a hosted service. Mistral pitches it at security teams and reports 51% on the Artificial Analysis Cyber Index, while a penetration-testing version stays in vetted preview with partners such as Orange Cyberdefense. Hugging Face's serving examples use eight Nvidia H200 GPUs, and the smallest compressed version runs on a single Apple Silicon Ultra with 512 GB of memory at about 15 tokens a second. On Mistral's API it costs $0.70 per million input tokens and $2.10 per million output. The benchmark figures are Mistral's own.
What it actually means
For most teams the weights change less than the price, because few have eight H200s spare and a model this size on a Mac is too slow for real work. What you get is a European model you can test through the API today at $0.70 in, with the option to move it onto your own hardware or a sovereign cloud if a client or regulator later demands it, which is an exit most closed models do not offer.
Read the licence before you build on it. If you are an agency or software company that would resell access to the model, the hosted-service clause means you need a deal with Mistral first, so settle that before a client contract depends on it. Security teams have a narrower reason to try it, because Mistral says several closed models score near zero on its patching test by refusing to attempt it, and that claim is worth checking on your own tasks rather than its benchmarks.
Open weights matter to most teams as an exit route, not as something they will run tomorrow.
$0.70Mistral Large 4's API price per million input tokens
Source: Mistral · Friday, 30 October 2026