Mistral Large 3 is Mistral AI’s flagship language model, released on December 2, 2025 as part of the broader Mistral 3 lineup. It uses a sparse mixture-of-experts design with 675 billion total parameters but only about 41 billion active per token, so it runs at roughly the compute cost of a much smaller dense model while drawing on a far larger pool of learned weights. It takes both text and images as input, handles a 256,000-token context window, and Mistral released the weights under an Apache 2.0 license, a departure from the closed approach it took with Mistral Large 2.
The model placed near the top of the open-weight field on the LMArena leaderboard at launch and is aimed at developers who want frontier-level reasoning, coding, and multilingual performance without being locked into a closed API. It is available through Mistral’s Le Chat assistant, its own API, Azure AI, and as downloadable weights on Hugging Face for anyone who wants to self-host or fine-tune it, with API pricing set well below what Mistral charged for Large 2.