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The licence fine print on "open" AI models

Which models you actually own, which you lease, and which can be revoked at any time. Reading the licences so you don't have to — with direct quotes.

Read the fine print

Per tool: licence/terms version, whether it trains on your inputs, and whether commercial use is allowed. Receipts on GitHub.

13 curated, receipts-backed across 5 categories.

Commercial Cloud LLM APIs · 2

Anthropic API (Claude)

Anthropic does not train on customer API inputs or outputs by default. Zero retention except for a short safety-classification window and the prompt cache. Outputs are yours; commercial use of generated content is allowed. (Different terms apply to the free Claude.ai consumer tier — read that separately.)

🟢 CleanCommercial Terms 2025No training on inputs (default)Outputs are yoursZero retention

Grok (xAI API)

API content is auto-deleted within 30 days and not used for training by default; the consumer Grok privacy policy does NOT apply to API data — read the enterprise terms instead. Caveat: the consumer Grok app trains on your public X posts by default outside the EU. The API and the consumer product are two different products with two different deals.

🟢 CleanxAI API Enterprise Terms 202630-day auto-deleteNo training (API default)Consumer tier differs (read separately)

Open-Weights LLMs · 1

Llama 4

Free for commercial and research use — UNLESS your product, or one of its parent companies, had ≥ 700 million monthly active users at the Llama 3 release date. In that case you need a separate licence from Meta. For everyone else (i.e. almost everyone) this is genuinely commercial-friendly weights.

🟡 Conditional — MAU thresholdLlama 4 Community License700M MAU triggerOtherwise commercial OK

Image Generation Models · 7

FLUX.2 [dev] (Black Forest Labs)

FLUX.2-dev Non-Commercial License. The 32B flagship of the FLUX.2 family — top output quality, biggest VRAM appetite, and the most restrictive licence of the three (klein 4B is Apache 2.0; klein 9B is non-commercial; dev 32B is also non-commercial). Personal projects, research, fine-tuning experiments OK. Commercial requires a BFL Commercial Use Agreement.

🟡 Conditional — non-commercialFLUX.2-dev Non-Commercial License32B flagshipCommercial needs BFL agreementPick klein 4B for commercial

FLUX.2 [klein] 4B (Black Forest Labs)

Apache 2.0. The 4B variant of FLUX.2 [klein] is released as genuinely open-source — full commercial use, modification, redistribution, royalty-free. Build a paid app, a SaaS, a game with integrated image generation — all OK. Note: the LARGER FLUX.2 [klein] 9B and FLUX.2 [dev] are NOT Apache 2.0 (see separate entries).

🟢 CleanApache 2.0Full commercial useRoyalty-freeSibling 9B/dev are NOT Apache (separate entries)

FLUX.2 [klein] 9B (Black Forest Labs)

FLUX Non-Commercial License. The 9B variant gives you the bigger model capacity at the cost of commercial rights — research, personal projects, fine-tuning experiments are allowed; shipping a paid product on these weights is NOT, unless you sign a separate Commercial Use Agreement with Black Forest Labs (their tiered SaaS plan starts at 100K images/month).

🟡 Conditional — non-commercialFLUX Non-Commercial LicenseResearch + personal OKCommercial needs BFL agreement9B capacity costs the open-source bit

Qwen-Image (Alibaba)

Apache 2.0. Strong open-weights text-to-image model from Alibaba with notable strength in complex text rendering inside images (a long-standing weak point for diffusion models). Full commercial use, modification, fine-tuning, self-hosted deployment — no restrictions.

🟢 CleanApache 2.0Full commercial useSelf-host OKStrong text-in-image rendering

Qwen-Image-Edit (Alibaba)

Apache 2.0. Alibaba's natural-language image-editing companion to Qwen-Image — instruct it to edit existing images with text prompts. Same permissive licence as the base model: full commercial use, modification, fine-tuning, self-hosted deployment all allowed.

🟢 CleanApache 2.0Full commercial useSelf-host OKNatural-language image editing

Stable Diffusion 3 Medium / Large

Free for non-commercial use, and for commercial use by individuals and businesses under USD 1 million in annual revenue. Above that revenue threshold you need a Stability AI Enterprise license. Outputs are yours.

🟡 Conditional — revenue capStability AI Community License<$1M revenue commercial OKOutputs are yours

Z-Image Turbo (Tongyi-MAI)

Apache 2.0. 6B-parameter text-to-image model from Tongyi-MAI (Alibaba's AI division) optimised for speed — ultra-fast photorealistic generation. Released November 2025 under one of the most permissive AI-model licences in circulation: full commercial use, modification, redistribution, self-hosted deployment.

🟢 CleanApache 2.06B params (fast)Full commercial useSelf-host OK

AI Coding Assistants · 1

Claude Code / Claude Desktop

Code you submit via Claude Code / Claude Desktop is governed by Anthropic's Commercial Terms — same zero-retention and no-training-on-inputs defaults as the raw API. Runs locally on your machine; prompts are sent to Anthropic for inference. No code-snippet harvesting.

🟢 CleanInherits Anthropic Commercial TermsNo code harvestingLocal-client, cloud-inference

Video Generation Models · 2

LTX-2 / LTX-2.3 (Lightricks)

Free commercial use up to USD 10 million aggregated annual revenue across subsidiaries and affiliates. Required conditions: must disclose AI-generated content to viewers, no deepfakes / impersonation without consent, and you may NOT use it to build a service that competes with LTX-2 video generation. Above $10M revenue you negotiate with Lightricks (liquidated damages clause is 2× retroactive fees if you used it commercially without paying). Outputs are yours — videos can be sold, monetised on YouTube, used in ads.

🟡 Conditional — multiple clausesLTX-2 Community License<$10M revenue commercial OKDisclose AI-generated contentNo competing serviceOutputs are yours

Wan 2.2 (Alibaba Tongyi Lab)

Apache 2.0. Full commercial use, modification, redistribution. No revenue cap, no disclosure requirement, no anti-competition clause. Alibaba publicly released weights, architecture, and code under one of the most permissive open-source licences. Mixture-of-experts video generation, text-to-video and image-to-video.

🟢 CleanApache 2.0Full commercial useWeights + code openNo vendor lock-in

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