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Mistral Large 3

europe's frontier answer under apache 2.0 — and mistral resisted the temptation to reach for its old research licence.

free (apache 2.0)#teams-who-want-top-tier-

the highest-ranked open model on lmarena after gemini, licensed apache 2.0 with nothing bolted on — the main catch is that it's now eight months old.

mistral has shipped flagships under its own research-and-commercial split licence before, so apache 2.0 here was not a foregone conclusion. the model card links the standard apache text directly and adds no custom terms — the announcement's 'all models released under apache 2.0' holds up against the repository.

at 675b total and 41b active with a 256k context, it is reported as the top open-source coding model on lmarena and second overall among open models at roughly 1418 elo, behind only gemini among all models at publication. the ministral 3 siblings at 14b, 8b and 3b carry the same licence, which makes this the most complete permissive family here.

the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.

pricing
free (apache 2.0)
our verdict

the highest-ranked open model on lmarena after gemini, licensed apache 2.0 with nothing bolted on — the main catch is that it's now eight months old.

we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.

more open-weight llms

Nous Hermes

nous research's fine-tunes, published with open weights

#fine-tunes

AI21 Jamba

hybrid mamba-transformer models with long context, weights released

#long-context#hybrid

Falcon

model family from abu dhabi's technology innovation institute

#research

GLM-5.2

we checked thisfree (mit)

the top-ranked open-weight model on the intelligence index, under plain unmodified mit, with a launch post that tells the truth.

#anyone-who-wants-the-str#needs-the-legal-answer-t