Open-Weight License

An open-weight license defines the conditions under which an AI model with publicly available weights may be used, modified, hosted, or redistributed. The term matters because open weight does not automatically mean open source. Many providers release model weights while keeping restrictions around commercial use, competitive use cases, high-risk domains, redistribution, model distillation, or revenue and user thresholds. To engineering teams, such a model can look freely usable at first, while legal, procurement, and security teams may later find hard limits. An open-weight license should therefore be reviewed before benchmarks, fine-tuning, or production integration begin. The relevant question is not only price or performance, but the rights across the full model lifecycle: download, hosting, adaptation, output use, customer delivery, audit obligations, and exit paths. In companies, this review touches several roles. Developers want to test, business teams want results, legal checks contractual risk, security reviews data flows, and leadership wants to avoid a dependency that fails later. The license is part of the architecture decision.