Five frontier-class open-weight LLMs shipped in last 30 days — Llama 4, Qwen 3.5, DeepSeek V4, Gemma 4, Mistral Medium 3.5, Apache 2.0 dominates
The last 30 days have seen five frontier-class open-weight LLMs ship: Meta Llama 4 (Scout 10M context + Maverick 1M), Alibaba Qwen 3.5, DeepSeek V4 (Pro and Flash under MIT license), Google Gemma 4 (26B / 14GB optimized for accessibility), and Mistral Medium 3.5. Apache 2.0 has won the permissive-license race. The enterprise self-hosting market now has more frontier-tier options than the closed-weight Western frontier.
The license consolidation around Apache 2.0 is the structural piece. Through 2024 the open-weight frontier was a patchwork of bespoke licenses with subtly different commercial-use restrictions, which slowed enterprise adoption. By mid-2026 the dominant licenses are Apache 2.0 (most of the Qwen lineup, Gemma, Mistral, Llama 4) and MIT (DeepSeek V4). The compliance friction that slowed enterprise adoption through 2024-2025 is essentially gone. For enterprises evaluating open-weight options, the procurement decision now sits on capability and ecosystem fit rather than on legal review.
The capability distribution across the families is what makes the market actually competitive. Llama 4 (Scout, Maverick) leads on instruction-following for general-purpose deployments. Qwen 3.5 leads on coding and agent benchmarks. DeepSeek V4 leads on reasoning at the MIT-licensed frontier tier. Gemma 4 at 26B is the deployable-on-laptop choice for on-device inference. Mistral Medium 3.5 leads on European-language tasks and on commercial terms favorable to EU enterprise. The enterprise self-hosting market now has five strong choices where in 2024 it had effectively one (Llama 3.1 405B). The competitive dynamic between them drives the per-token economics down for everyone — and reframes Alibaba's Qwen 3.6 Max-Preview closed-weight pivot as a strategic outlier rather than a market signal.
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