October 27 arrived, and Mistral Large 4’s weights did not come with it. At 14:46Z on Tuesday, a fetch of the primary surfaces carrying this release – the Hugging Face placeholder and Mistral’s own blog index – shows the same state they held yesterday: an upcoming-release page, a countdown to October 31, one planned artifact, and no weights.
The Hugging Face card still reads “Upcoming release.” Its countdown at that fetch stood at 04 days, 00 hours, 13 minutes to October 31 at 15:00Z, stamped as a Current ETA whose tooltip says “The release date may still change” – an approximateEta field, not a commitment. The repository lists a single planned artifact and serves no model files. The wait list keeps moving while the artifacts do not: 813 people waiting on October 14, 939 on October 24, 951 on October 26, 969 at this fetch.
The countdown piece this desk published yesterday closed on the claim that would outlive the calendar: the LICENSE. That claim now has a fetch behind it. A direct request to the LICENSE path returned HTTP 404 at 14:47:45Z. The file does not exist, so no statement about what Mistral Large 4 permits or forbids is available to make. What yesterday’s piece posed as open stays open: does the file repeat the $20M revenue gate that Mistral’s existing Modified MIT terms impose, move it, or do something the precedent does not prepare builders for. Absence is the reportable fact, and it stays that way.
Two dates are still in conflict, and neither resolves in Mistral’s own words. October 27 is the day Reuters reported for the weights drop; Reuters has never been read directly at this desk, so the peg rests on secondary coverage citing the wire. October 31 is what the Hugging Face card carries. Mistral’s own October 6 announcement, unchanged since October 7, commits to nothing narrower than “Weights drop end of this month” and “We will release the weights by the end of the month.” Mistral’s blog index, fetched the same minute, holds 92 results with the newest entry still dated October 6 and the most recent post of any kind dated October 21. The separate newsroom path this desk has cited in earlier coverage now returns 404 – a retired URL, named here as a fetch result rather than treated as a missing announcement.
The shape has a precedent inside our own archive. StepFun promised October 15 on September 20; when the date arrived, the expected repository returned 404 and the license was still unpublished – the vendor-promise class’s first exhibit. Mistral’s signal is stronger: a dated card plus a month-end sentence rather than a bare day. It is still not a dated commitment, which is why the three pegs sitting in the last four days of October were mapped as expectations, never as a schedule.
What that leaves deployers is the rule this beat has been building toward for a month: gate migration scheduling, procurement review, and compliance work on the fetch of a LICENSE file, not on a timer or a wire story. The timer said October 27. The fetch says 404. The gate stays shut at the reported date itself, and it opens when the file exists.