Falcon

Free

Open LLM family from UAE's Technology Innovation Institute with the permissive TII Falcon License

What is Falcon?

Falcon is the open-source LLM family developed by the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi, first launched in 2023 with Falcon 7B and 40B and now continuing into 2026 with the Falcon 3 generation. Falcon earned its reputation early by briefly topping the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard with Falcon 40B, and TII kept pushing with Falcon 180B and Falcon 2 multimodal in 2024. The 2025 Falcon 3 release focused on efficiency with strong 1B, 3B, 7B, and 10B checkpoints that run on laptops and edge devices. Falcon models are released under the TII Falcon License based on Apache 2.0 with additional acceptable-use provisions — in practical terms, Falcon is free to download, fine-tune, and use commercially for the vast majority of applications, though hosting Falcon as a managed service may require separate arrangements with TII. Where Falcon stands out is as a credible non-US, non-Chinese open LLM option: for governments, enterprises, and researchers who want to diversify their LLM supply chain away from Meta, Google, and Alibaba, Falcon offers an independent pretraining lineage with different data sources, languages, and safety tuning. It is particularly strong in Arabic and MENA-region languages where major Western models lag.

⚡ Quick Verdict

Best for

Teams that want a non-US/non-China open LLM or need strong Arabic language capabilities

Not ideal for

Users who want the largest ecosystem or zero-fine-print Apache 2.0 licensing

Starting price

Free to download · Inference via third parties

Free plan

Yes — weights are free under the TII Falcon License

Key strength

Independent pretraining lineage with strong Arabic support and efficient small models

Limitation

Smaller ecosystem and less permissive license than Gemma

Bottom line: Falcon scores 4.2/5 — the top pick when geographic LLM diversification or Arabic language support matters. Choose Falcon 3 for laptops, Falcon 180B for frontier open performance.

Pricing

Weights — Free: All Falcon models can be downloaded from Hugging Face or falconllm.tii.ae under the TII Falcon License. Commercial use is permitted for the vast majority of applications without fees.

Inference providers: Falcon is available on Hugging Face Inference, AWS SageMaker JumpStart, and community-hosted endpoints at standard per-token rates.

Self-hosting: Falcon 3 1B and 3B run on laptops. Falcon 7B and 10B need a consumer GPU (RTX 4070+). Falcon 180B requires multi-GPU server clusters.

Licensing note: Hosting Falcon as a shared managed service may require a separate license agreement with TII.

Key Features

TII Falcon License — Apache 2.0-based permissive license
Falcon 3 generation: 1B, 3B, 7B, 10B checkpoints
Falcon 180B for frontier-class open performance
Falcon 2 multimodal with vision capabilities
Strong Arabic and MENA-region language support
Pre-trained on RefinedWeb dataset
Available on Hugging Face and AWS SageMaker
Backed by UAE's Technology Innovation Institute

Pros & Cons

Pros

Independent non-US/non-China open LLM option
Excellent Arabic and MENA language performance
Efficient Falcon 3 small models for edge deployment
Permissive license for most commercial use cases

Cons

Smaller community and ecosystem than Llama or Mistral
License has more fine print than Apache 2.0
Managed-hosting clause can complicate some SaaS deployments

✅ Pricing verified April 2026 · ✅ Independently reviewed · ✅ Scoring methodology

FAQ

Is Falcon free for commercial use?

For almost everyone, yes. Falcon models released under the TII Falcon License (based on Apache 2.0) can be used commercially, modified, and redistributed without fees. The main caveat is that hosting Falcon as a shared managed service may require a separate agreement with TII. For internal enterprise use, building applications on top of Falcon, and most SaaS scenarios, no license negotiation is needed.

Which Falcon model should I use?

For laptop and edge deployment, Falcon 3 1B and 3B are the most efficient options. For server inference on a single consumer GPU, Falcon 3 7B or 10B hit the best capability/cost balance. Falcon 180B is reserved for teams with multi-GPU H100 clusters — it offers near-frontier open-model performance but at significantly higher infrastructure cost.

How does Falcon compare to Llama?

Meta Llama 4 and Llama 3.3 70B outperform Falcon on most English-language benchmarks and have a much larger fine-tune ecosystem. Falcon wins in three scenarios: geographic diversification away from US model providers, Arabic and MENA-region language tasks, and efficient Falcon 3 small models for edge deployment.

Is Falcon good for Arabic?

Yes — Arabic and MENA-region language support is one of Falcon's biggest differentiators. TII is UAE-based, and the pretraining data includes significantly more high-quality Arabic text than most Western open models. For Arabic-first applications, Falcon generally outperforms Llama, Gemma, and Mistral on MENA benchmarks.

Where can I run Falcon?

You can download weights from Hugging Face and run locally with Transformers, Ollama, or vLLM. Managed hosting is available on AWS SageMaker JumpStart, and Hugging Face Inference Endpoints can serve Falcon with pay-per-hour GPU pricing.

What is the RefinedWeb dataset?

RefinedWeb is TII's curated pretraining dataset filtered from Common Crawl with aggressive deduplication and quality filters. It was one of the first large-scale demonstrations that high-quality web data alone can match or beat curated corpora for LLM pretraining, and it remains open for research use on Hugging Face.