Open AI models: The license determines what you can use them for

Many AI models are called "open," but that doesn't necessarily say what you're allowed to use them for. That is the finding of a review by the analysis site Digital Applied of 30 models from 17 organizations that were called open in 2026.

"Open weight" means that the model's internal settings, the so-called weights, can be downloaded and used by others. But the terms of use are set out in the license, and they vary widely.

What the review found

Of the 30 models, 17 (57 percent) have a truly permissive license, meaning Apache-2.0, MIT or similar. These give broad latitude to use, modify and share the model.

11 models (37 percent) have commercial restrictions. These can include thresholds for revenue or user numbers, branding requirements or a requirement for a separate agreement. 2 models (7 percent) had no publicly available repository under the developer's control on Hugging Face, a widely used site for sharing AI models.

One example is Black Forest Labs, which released two FLUX.2 models 18 minutes apart on January 14, 2026. One (4B) uses Apache-2.0, while the other (9B) may only be used non-commercially and has access controls.

Thresholds and exceptions

Typical thresholds are USD 10 million a year at Lightricks and Liquid AI and USD 20 million at Moonshot and MiniMax. Meta's Llama 4 is free for commercial use up to 700 million monthly active users. According to Digital Applied, the threshold makes no difference for most companies, but it creates friction compared with competitors that offer full freedom.

According to IntuitionLabs, Tencent's Hunyuan excludes the EU, the United Kingdom and South Korea, and Llama 4's multimodal models exclude individuals and companies domiciled in the EU. Some licenses also require branding such as "Built with Llama" or "Built with Qwen."

Permissive licensing at several major players

According to Digital Applied's comparison from April 2026, Google's Gemma 4, Alibaba's Qwen 3.6 Plus, Mistral Small 4 and OpenAI's gpt-oss-120b all use Apache 2.0. Zhipu AI's GLM-5 has an MIT license. Llama 4 is the only one of the six with a user threshold.

What it means

IntuitionLabs assesses that open weight is a spectrum and not an either-or, and that you should check the license for the specific checkpoint before using a model. Digital Applied says the same in other words: "The label has stopped carrying information; the licence text now carries all of it."

The sources are analysis sites and not the license texts themselves, and they do not fully agree on all model versions. Terms can also change between versions.