The $20M Success Ceiling: Why Labs are Gating Innovation, Not Models

For eleven weeks, the industry watched as StepFun, Meta, Moonshot AI, and Mistral converged on a $20M revenue ceiling for open weights commercial deployment. With the release of Mistral Large 4, that convention has been broken. The LICENSE gate has been fundamentally redesigned, and the $20M revenue threshold, which previously defined the four-labs convergence , has been dropped entirely. In its place, Mistral has installed a gate on the business model itself, specifically targeting Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) providers rather than those hitting a specific financial milestone. The MaaS Gate: Defining the Boundary The new license structure is precise in its reach.

Source: Forkast