Devstral 2, released on 9 December 2025, was Mistral's answer to the shift in how code models are used: not autocomplete in an editor, but an agent that reads a repository, edits several files and checks whether the tests pass. At 123 billion parameters it scored 72.2% on SWE-bench Verified — the benchmark built from real GitHub issues — and Mistral claimed it did the same real-world work up to seven times more cost-efficiently than Claude Sonnet.
It shipped as a family with a smaller sibling, Devstral Small 2, at 24 billion parameters and 68% on the same benchmark, which mattered because that version runs on a laptop with 32 GB of RAM. The pairing let a developer prototype against the hosted model and then run something only a few points weaker entirely offline. Alongside the models Mistral released Mistral Vibe, a command-line tool built specifically to drive them through end-to-end coding tasks.
The licensing was unusually permissive for a model of this strength: a modified MIT licence for Devstral 2 and Apache 2.0 for Devstral Small 2, with the large model free through the API at launch. That licence is why the retirement is only half a retirement. Mistral deprecated the model on 22 May 2026 and shut down the hosted endpoint on 31 July 2026, pointing users to Mistral Medium 3.5 — but unlike a closed model that simply stops existing when the vendor unplugs it, the published weights remain legally usable by anyone who downloaded them.