Open Weights, Licensed Hosting: Auditing Mistral Large 4's Terms for Commercial API Builders
Mistral put weights for Mistral Large 4 online for free — coverage describes a 1T-parameter model, published on Hugging Face, with coding performance said to rival a closed frontier model. The same coverage says hosting providers need a licence. That clause is the difference between a download and a product. This walkthrough treats an open-weights release as a distribution decision rather than a permission slip. It splits the licence into four independent grants — running the weights, redistributing them, serving them to third parties, and relicensing a derivative — and explains why silence on any one of them isn't a grant. Then it runs the fifteen-minute audit: pin a revision, pull the licence file, the model card and the architecture config, hash them, and record the date, so the answer is still checkable when the next revision lands. Read the full post: https://hackyjs.com/posts/open-weights-licensed-hosting-auditing-mistral-large-4s-terms-for-commercial-api-builders One caveat the post makes itself: the coverage it draws on does not reproduce the licence text, so the hosting clause's real scope — tenancy, revenue, public availability — has to be verified against the licence file in the repository you actually pull. Nothing here is legal advice, and there's no exploit content: it's licence auditing and record-keeping for teams shipping a commercial API.