Llama 3.3 70B Instruct, Mistral Large 2, and Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct are three 70B-class open-weights models from different publishers, all carrying 131K context windows and all reaching production maturity well before 2026. Llama 3.3 70B (Meta, December 2024) and Qwen 2.5 72B (Alibaba, September 2024) are widely hosted on commodity inference providers; Mistral Large 2 (July 2024) is distributed under the Mistral Research license, restricting commercial use without a Mistral enterprise agreement. Mistral Large 2 delivers strong multilingual performance across European languages and competitive coding evals for its size class. The Mistral Research license is the material constraint: teams that need fully commercial, unrestricted deployment should read the license carefully before building on it. For organizations already in a Mistral commercial relationship, the quality-per-token profile is competitive. Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct remains widely deployed because workloads pinned to a specific checkpoint rarely migrate quickly. Benchmark scores on MMLU, HumanEval, and multilingual evals hold up against current-generation peers. It is the strongest multilingual option among the three, with particularly good handling of CJK text. The Qwen license covers commercial use. With Qwen 3 72B now available, new deployments should evaluate whether the upgrade is warranted. Llama 3.3 70B is the default recommendation for new deployments at this tier. The December 2024 alignment improvements deliver better instruction-following and tool-use reliability than the 3.1 baseline. Widest provider coverage, Llama 3 community license, and a deep fine-tune ecosystem. Pick Mistral Large 2 if you have a Mistral commercial agreement and value European-language quality. Pick Qwen 2.5 72B for CJK multilingual workloads or pinned-checkpoint reproducibility. Pick Llama 3.3 70B for new general-purpose deployments that need breadth of provider choice.