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European AI powerhouse Mistral today launched Magistral, a new family of large language models (LLMs) that marks the first from the company to enter the increasingly competitive space of “reasoning,” or models that take time to reflect on their thinking to catch errors and solve more complex tasks than basic text-based LLMs.

The announcement features a strategic dual release: a powerful, proprietary Magistral Medium for enterprise clients, and, notably, a 24-billion parameter open-source version, Magistral Small.

The latter release appears calculated to reinforce the company’s commitment to its foundational roots, following a period where it faced criticism for leaning into more closed, proprietary models such as its Medium 3 for enterprises, launched back in May 2025.

A return to open source roots

In a move that will undoubtedly be celebrated by developers and the wider AI community, Mistral is releasing Magistral Small under the permissive open source Apache 2.0 license.

This is a crucial detail. Unlike more restrictive licenses, Apache 2.0 allows anyone to freely use, modify, and distribute the model’s source code, even for commercial purposes.

This empowers startups and established companies alike to build and deploy their own applications on top of Mistral’s latest reasoning architecture without licensing fees or fear of vendor lock-in....