Enterprises today are embracing open-weight models for their transparency, flexibility, and ability to run across a broad range of deployment architectures. As the number of open models grows, the bar for reliability, instruction-following quality, multimodal reasoning, and long-context performance continues to rise.
Today, we’re excited to announce that Mistral Large 3 is now available in Azure, bringing one of the strongest open-weight, Apache-licensed frontier models to the Microsoft Cloud.
Mistral Large 3 delivers frontier-class capabilities with open-source flexibility, making it a powerful option for organizations building production assistants, retrieval-augmented applications, agentic systems, and multimodal workflows.
Enterprise-ready open models
Mistral Large 3 sits in the leading tier of globally available open models alongside DeepSeek and the GPT OSS family. It is optimized not only for benchmark-chasing on abstract mathematical puzzles, but also for what customers need most in real enterprise applications:
- Highly reliable instruction following
- Long-context comprehension and retention
- Strong multimodal reasoning
- Stable, predictable performance across dialogue and applied reasoning
According to Mistral, Mistral Large 3 shows fewer breakdowns and more consistent behavior than most peers, especially in multi-turn conversations and complex, extended inputs. It is designed for production, not just experimentation.
Mistral 3 is optimized for real-world scenarios
Instruction reliability you can depend on
Many open models excel on benchmarks but struggle with instruction clarity when deployed in real workflows. Mistral Large 3 reverses that trend by demonstrating:
- Precise adherence to task instructions
- Strong grounding in domain knowledge
- Low hallucination rates
- Consistent formatting in structured outputs
This makes it particularly effective for agents, automation flows, and business logic integration where reliability is non-negotiable.
Exceptional long-context handling
With extended context support, Mistral Large 3 processes, retains, and reasons over long documents, multi-step sequences, and sustained dialogues with notable stability.
Enterprises can use it for:
- Retrieval-augmented generation
- Document understanding
- Multi-turn conversational systems
- Long-form summarization and synthesis
Its ability to maintain coherence over long sessions reduces error cascades and produces more predictable outcomes.
Multimodal and applied reasoning
As organizations build increasingly multimodal workflows, interpreting text, images, diagrams, and structured data, Mistral Large 3 provides strong cross-modal understanding with balanced behavior.
It excels in:
- Visual question answering
- Diagram or chart interpretation
- Multimodal retrieval and grounding
- Combined reasoning over text and image inputs
Its stability makes it ideal for use cases where multimodal reasoning must be accurate, not approximate.
Fully Open and Apache 2.0 licensed
Mistral Large 3 stands out as the strongest fully open model developed outside of China and offers something rare in the global ecosystem:
Frontier-level capability, Apache 2.0 licensing, reproducible results, and worldwide availability without regional restrictions.
Organizations can:
- Integrate the model in Microsoft Foundry
- Export weights for hybrid or on-premises deployment (subject to Mistral licensing)
- Run it in their own VPC, edge, or sovereign cloud environments
- Fine-tune or customize freely
- Use it for commercial applications without attribution requirements
This combination of capability and openness is uniquely compelling for global enterprises requiring flexibility, transparency, and long-term vendor independence.
Why Mistral Large 3 in Azure?
Foundry provides an end-to-end workspace for model development, evaluation, and deployment, including unified governance, observability, and agent-ready tooling.
With Mistral Large 3 in Foundry, customers gain:
1.Unified access to top-performing models
Simplified and secure access to Mistral Large 3 and Mistral Document AI as first-party models available on Foundry alongside other open and commercial frontier models.
2. End-to-end evaluation and observability
Foundry delivers end-to-end evaluations, routing, and observability, enabling organizations to benchmark Mistral Large 3 across cost, latency, throughput, and quality, while monitoring performance and spending through a single set of dashboards and SDKs. Workloads can be intelligently routed to the most efficient model with no added integration effort.
3. Enterprise-grade safety and governance
Foundry applies Responsible AI safeguards, content filters, and auditability across all model interactions, ensuring safe, compliant deployments.
4. Agent-first capabilities
Mistral Large 3 supports tool calling, enabling agentic systems that can take action, automate workflows, and connect to enterprise data and APIs. This foundation supports customer service bots, research agents, automation flows, and enterprise copilots.
Unlocking new use cases across industries
- Enterprise knowledge assistants: Long-context comprehension enables rich, grounded conversations across corporate knowledge bases.
- Document intelligence and retrieval-augmented pipelines: Stable reasoning and consistent formatting make it ideal for summarization, extraction, and multi-document synthesis.
- Developer agents and automation: Reliable instruction supports code refactoring, test generation, and workflow automation.
- Multimodal customer experiences: Combining image and text understanding enables richer digital assistant and customer support experiences.
Pricing
| Model | Deployment type | Azure resource regions | Price/1M tokens | Availability |
| Mistral Large 3 | Global Standard | West US 3 | Input: $0.5 Output: $1.5 | Dec 2, 2025—public preview |
The future of open models on Azure
With the addition of Mistral Large 3, Foundry continues to expand its position as the cloud platform with the widest selection of open and frontier models, unified under a single, enterprise-ready ecosystem.
As organizations increasingly demand transparent, flexible, and globally accessible intelligence, Mistral Large 3 sets a new benchmark for what a production-ready open model can deliver.