Tier 2 Restricted open-weight
What the publisher claims: open-weight, open models
The one-liner: Open weights whose license switches off for larger companies.
The six questions
Weights are downloadable from Hugging Face as Mistral-Medium-3.5-128B.
The modified MIT grant withdraws itself for any company whose consolidated global monthly revenue exceeded $20M in the preceding month, so a substantial class of users has no license at all and must renegotiate; that is a meaningful restriction rather than a caveat.
Runs independently on chosen hardware with standard open inference stacks, once the license question is cleared.
A model card and technical material are published; training data and the full recipe are not.
Limited: no published corpus or reproducible training recipe.
Medium 3.5 releases weights, a model card, and deployment guidance with no public training or evaluation repository attached, so outside developers can only raise issues with Mistral.
License
Modified MIT with a company-wide monthly revenue threshold — license source ↗
- If the licensee's consolidated global monthly revenue exceeded $20M in the preceding month, no rights under the license may be exercised and a commercial license must be sought
- The threshold applies to total company revenue, not only to the service built on the model
What is actually released
- weights (128B)
- model card
- deployment and serving guidance
Why it matters
Medium 3.5 is the sharpest test of the 'downloadable means unrestricted' assumption: the weights are open and the license is a modified MIT, yet the grant evaporates for any company above a revenue line.
Sources
- https://docs.mistral.ai/models
- https://vdf.ai/blog/mistral-on-premises-deployment
- https://redreamality.com/blog/mistral-large-4-open-weight-flagships-2026-survey
- https://www.thundercompute.com/blog/self-host-mistral
Derived from the openness dataset behind But Is It Open? — snapshot 2026-11-07 ↗. Scores are qualitative readings of the cited evidence, not verdicts; tier measures openness, not intelligence.