Llama 4 Behemoth

Overview

Llama 4 Behemoth is Meta's largest and most capable model in the Llama 4 family — announced alongside Scout and Maverick in April 2025 but not yet fully released as of February 2026. With 288 billion active parameters and 2 trillion total parameters, it is one of the largest AI models ever disclosed. It serves primarily as a "teacher model" used to distill knowledge into smaller Llama 4 models, and Meta has indicated it outperforms GPT-4.5, Claude Sonnet 3.7, and Gemini 2.0 Pro on STEM-focused benchmarks.

Behemoth sits at the frontier of what Meta is building internally. When it becomes publicly available, it is expected to represent Meta's strongest offering for research, complex reasoning, and scientific applications — and to further demonstrate the capability of open-weight models at the extreme end of scale.

Specifications

• Developer: Meta AI
• Status: Announced April 2025; not fully released as of February 2026 (available in limited preview/research access)
• Type: Multimodal LLM, Mixture-of-Experts, Open-Weight (anticipated)
• Architecture: MoE — 288B active parameters / ~2T total parameters
• Context Window: TBA
• Modalities: Text and image (anticipated)
• License: Meta Llama 4 Community License (anticipated)
• Access: Limited preview as of February 2026

Capabilities

STEM Benchmark Leadership: At announcement, Meta reported Behemoth outperforming GPT-4.5, Claude Sonnet 3.7, and Gemini 2.0 Pro on STEM-focused benchmarks — though direct comparisons with models released in late 2025 and early 2026 have not been fully published.

Teacher Model Role: Primarily used internally to improve the capabilities of smaller Llama 4 models via knowledge distillation — meaning Behemoth's intelligence is already embedded in Scout and Maverick even before public release.

Extreme Scale: At 2 trillion total parameters, it approaches the scale of the largest known AI models, with 288 billion active per token.

Limitations

As of February 2026, full public access has not been confirmed. No pricing, API access, or formal deployment details have been released. Benchmark comparisons are against models from early 2025; how it compares to Anthropic's Claude 4-series or Google's Gemini 3-series — released later in 2025 — is not yet publicly documented.

Recent Developments

• April 2025 Announcement: Revealed as the flagship of the Llama 4 family, with STEM benchmark claims and its role as a teacher model highlighted.
• Anticipated Public Release: Expected to launch for broader developer access in 2026; Meta has not confirmed a specific date as of February 2026.

Last Updated

February 26, 2026