The weights are free. The license often isn't.
Many open-weight models ship under non-commercial or revenue-capped terms. OpenWeights.com tells you which license your company needs and connects you to the lab that sells it.
Open weights with commercial strings attached
Downloadable today, but production use needs a separate agreement, or comes with conditions, once you cross the line each lab has drawn.
| Lab and model | Weights license | Restriction | Where the line is | How to get commercial rights | Last checked |
|---|
Summaries of public license terms, for orientation only. Each row shows the date it was last checked. Terms change often; the lab's own license is the one that counts. Spot something out of date? Email openweights@openweights.com and we'll correct it. OpenWeights.com is independent and not affiliated with the labs listed. Sources and method
Know when a license changes
One short email when a lab changes its terms, adds a revenue cap or opens a commercial tier. Unsubscribe anytime.
From download to a signed license
Tell us the model and your size
Revenue, monthly users and region decide which clause applies. The check above gives you a first answer in seconds.
We map you to the right tier
Builder, platform, agency or enterprise. We send the lab a qualified request with your volume and deployment already filled in.
You sign directly with the lab
The contract and the rights are between you and the model's publisher. You get production rights without a month of back and forth.
Your sales team shouldn't field every small license request
You published the weights to build an ecosystem. OpenWeights.com turns the companies building on them into paying licensees, and sends you only the ones who qualify.
companies and organizations signed the Open Weights and American AI Leadership letter by August 2026. Open weights are now a boardroom decision, and boardrooms want clean licensing.
- Qualified leads
- Each request arrives with model, tier, volume, revenue band and region, so it's ready for pricing.
- Revenue share
- We earn only on licenses that close. No retainer, no listing fee.
- Your terms
- You set pricing and sign every contract. We never resell rights we don't hold.
- Compliance view
- See which companies are running your weights past the free threshold, so you can start the conversation.
- One category name
- "Open weights" is the exact phrase the industry, analysts and policymakers use for this market.
Open weights, open source, and what you can ship
The two terms get used as if they mean the same thing. They don't, and the difference decides whether you can put a model in production.
What are open weights?
A model's weights are the numbers it learned during training. When a lab publishes them, anyone can download the model, run it on their own hardware and fine-tune it. That's what "open weights" means: the trained model is available. It says nothing about the training data, the training code or what the license lets you do.
Is an open-weight model open source?
Usually not. The Open Source Initiative's definition of open source AI asks for more than the weights. It also requires the code used to train and run the model, and enough detail about the training data for someone else to rebuild a similar system, all under terms that allow any use.
Most models called "open" release only the weights, often under a custom license. That makes them open weights, not open source.
Can I use an open-weight model in a commercial product?
It depends entirely on the license. There are four common cases:
Permissive (Apache 2.0, MIT): commercial use is allowed.
Non-commercial (for example FLUX [dev], CC BY-NC): any commercial use needs a separate paid license.
Revenue cap (for example Stability AI at $1M, Kimi K3 at $20M): free until your company crosses the line.
User cap (for example Llama 4 at 700M monthly users): free until your product crosses the line.
The license check above tells you which case applies to you.
Can I sell what a non-commercial model generates?
Sometimes. Some licenses separate the model from its outputs. Black Forest Labs' FLUX [dev] license, for example, says outputs are not derivatives of the model, so generated images can be used commercially even though running the model in a commercial service needs a license. Other licenses treat outputs differently, so check each one.
What happens when my company crosses a threshold?
The free license stops covering you, and you need a separate agreement with the lab before you keep using the model commercially. Some licenses count revenue across your whole corporate group, so a small subsidiary of a large parent can be over the line from day one.
Does OpenWeights.com sell the licenses?
No. Only the lab that published a model can grant commercial rights to it. We work out which license you need, send the lab a complete request, and you sign directly with them.
About the desk
OpenWeights.com is an independent desk for open-weight AI licensing. It helps companies work out which license they need before they ship, and gives labs complete, qualified requests instead of cold inquiries.
No lab pays to be listed, and the directory shows each license as it is written. Labs and companies can reach the desk at openweights@openweights.com.
Need a license, or want to list a model?
Send the details and we'll reply with the right path for your model and company size.
openweights@openweights.comSources and method
1. The 11 of 30 figure comes from Digital Applied, "We Read the Licences on 2026 Open-Weight Models", published 16 August 2026. OpenWeights.com did not produce this count. The audit covered 30 models publicly described as open, open-weight or open-source, taken from each vendor's own Hugging Face account (no mirrors, fine-tunes or conversions). Most are 2026 releases; three earlier models were included for context: Mistral 3 (December 2025) and Llama 4 Scout and Maverick (April 2025). The models span text and code, multimodal, image, video and music.
A model counted as carrying a commercial condition if its license adds any of the following beyond permissive terms such as Apache 2.0 or MIT: a revenue or monthly-user threshold, mandatory branding, a separate paid or written agreement above a threshold, a non-commercial-only grant, or a manual approval gate.
2. The license directory summarizes each lab's published license and licensing pages, cross-checked against press coverage. The "Last checked" date on each row is when we last compared the summary with the lab's current terms. Rows are reviewed every two weeks.