Falcon LLM is a family of open-source large language models developed by the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), a research center under Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Research Council. TII released the first Falcon models in 2023, starting with a 40-billion-parameter model trained on a trillion tokens, and has since expanded the lineup through Falcon 2, Falcon 3, Falcon Mamba, Falcon-H1, and Arabic-focused variants.
Unlike closed models accessed only through an API, Falcon models are published with open weights on Hugging Face and GitHub, so organizations can download, fine-tune, and run them on their own infrastructure for data-sovereignty or on-premises requirements. Falcon 180B briefly topped the Hugging Face leaderboard for open pretrained language models after release, and the newer Falcon 3 line ships 30 model checkpoints ranging from 1 billion to 10 billion parameters aimed at running on lighter hardware.
Falcon targets developers, researchers, and enterprises that want a self-hosted or fine-tunable open model rather than a hosted chat API. The models are free for research and personal use under a license based on Apache 2.0, and free for commercial use up to $1 million in attributable annual revenue; above that threshold, commercial users need a separate licensing agreement with TII.
