Mistral Large, released February 26, 2024 alongside Mistral Small, was the company's pivot to a commercial frontier business: a closed flagship API model, second only to GPT-4 on several benchmarks at launch, with strong native fluency across French, German, Spanish, and Italian and a distribution partnership with Microsoft Azure.

The dual-track strategy it inaugurated — open-weight releases like Mixtral alongside proprietary flagships — became Mistral's signature. Mistral Large 2 (July 2024) returned the flagship tier to open weights at 123B parameters, and the line continued through Mistral Large 3 in December 2025.