Mistral Large 3 launched in December 2025 as Mistral's flagship open-weight model. Six months later it remains the largest model Mistral has publicly released under a permissive license. This guide covers the architecture, benchmarks, pricing, and practical considerations for developers deciding whether to use it in 2026.

What Mistral Large 3 Is

Mistral Large 3 (model ID mistral-large-2512 , the 2512 indicating December 2025) is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 675 billion total parameters and 41 billion active parameters per forward pass. Mistral trained it from scratch on 3,000 NVIDIA H200 GPUs.

The MoE architecture is the key efficiency decision. Instead of activating all 675B parameters for every token, the model routes each token through a subset of "expert" subnetworks.…