AI Model Licensing

AI model licensing is the legal and operational assessment of how a model may be used, hosted, modified, redistributed, or embedded in a commercial product. For closed APIs, the review usually focuses on terms of service, data handling, liability, resale rights, and acceptable-use limits. For open-weight models, the questions become broader: whether the weights can be used commercially, whether revenue or user thresholds trigger separate agreements, whether attribution must appear in the product experience, and what happens after fine-tuning or internal redistribution. The concept matters because model selection is not decided by benchmarks and token prices alone. A model can look excellent on performance and still be unsuitable if its license blocks a planned deployment model, customer segment, or hosting strategy. Strong AI model licensing connects legal review with architecture work. Procurement, model routing, data residency, audit logging, and exit planning are evaluated together before the model becomes a production dependency.