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Mistral built its name on freely licensed weights — its biggest one is still the model it published in April 2024

Mistral AI became a recognised name in September 2023 by publishing a 7.3-billion-parameter model under Apache 2.0 — the licence that lets anyone download, fine-tune and commercially resell the result without asking. Three months later, Mixtral 8x7B repeated the trick at a size that mattered: 46.7 billion parameters stored, 12.9 billion spent per token, benchmark scores at the level of Llama 2 70B and of the GPT-3.5 base model then serving free ChatGPT. In April 2024, Mixtral 8x22B scaled the same sparse design to 141 billion parameters, 39 billion of them active per token, with a 64,000-token window and native function calling. It, too, went out under Apache 2.0. That April 2024 release is still the largest model Mistral has ever opened. Everything above it changed terms: Mistral Large 2.1, from November 2024, shipped its weights under the Mistral Research License with a separate commercial licence sold on top, and the flagships that followed were never opened the same way. The company that made permissive licensing its signature has kept publishing open weights — but at the small and medium end, while the top of its range moved behind commercial terms. The practical consequence is that Apache 2.0 cannot be revoked. Mixtral 8x22B has disappeared from Mistral's own API line-up, which today lists Large 3, Medium 3.5, Small 4 and Ministral 3, and the company has never announced a shutdown date for it. That is not a problem for anyone relying on it: the weights sit on Hugging Face, third-party providers still serve them, and a licence granted under Apache 2.0 stays granted regardless of what the vendor's catalogue says. wujec.ai has now catalogued all three of these open releases.