Openness is not one thing. A lab can release weights under Apache 2.0, under a community licence with a user cap, or — rarely — everything including the data. The tag on each row is the usual case, not a promise: read the model card before you rely on it. The first chapter of this act explains the rungs.
permissive — Apache/MIT-stylecommunity — custom terms, often cappedfully open — data and code toomixed — ships open and closed
China
The largest concentration of open-weight releases — and generally the most permissive terms.
DeepSeekHangzhou · MoE + MLA, then open reasoning
V2V3R1distilled R1permissive
AlibabaHangzhou · the broadest family; a common fine-tune base
Qwen2.5Qwen3QwQQwen-VLQwen-Audiopermissive
Zhipu AIBeijing · agent-oriented general models
GLM-4GLM-4.5GLM-4.6permissive
Moonshot AIBeijing · long context, then a large MoE
KimiK1.5K2permissive
MiniMaxShanghai · efficient MoE; audio and video lines
MiniMax-01M1M2permissive
Shanghai AI LabShanghai · research-first, public checkpoints
InternLMInternVLpermissive
01.AIBeijing · early open bilingual line
Yipermissive
TencentShenzhen · broad multimodal releases
Hunyuanpermissive
ByteDanceBeijing · large-scale consumer models
DoubaoSeed-OSSmixed
BaiduBeijing · pivoted from closed to open weights
Ernie 4.5mixed
StepFunShanghai · multimodal and reasoning
Step-1Step-3permissive
HuaweiShenzhen · model line tied to Ascend hardware
Pangumixed
United States
Where open weights became mainstream — but often with a leash attached.
MetaMenlo Park · made open weights respectable
Llama 2Llama 3Llama 4community terms
GoogleMountain View · small, capable, custom terms
GemmaGemma 2Gemma 3community terms
MicrosoftRedmond · small models strong on reasoning
Phimixed
Allen Institute (AI2)Seattle · the fully-open reference
OLMoOLMoEMolmofully open
EleutherAIcollective · research models, data documented
PythiaGPT-NeoXfully open
xAIBay Area · released one large base model
Grok-1permissive
CohereToronto · RAG and multilingual focus
Command-RAyamixed
DatabricksSan Francisco · open enterprise MoE
DBRXpermissive
IBMArmonk · enterprise, permissively licensed
Granitepermissive
Hugging FaceNew York · small models for everyone
SmolLMpermissive
NVIDIASanta Clara · models tuned for its own hardware
Nemotronpermissive
Europe and the rest of the world
Smaller in number, and home to the clearest permissive flagship and a fully-open multilingual effort.
Mistral AIFrance · permissive flagship, no cap
Mistral 7BMixtralMistral Largemixed
TIIUnited Arab Emirates · large open models, early on
Falconpermissive
BigScienceinternational · a 176B model built in the open
BLOOMfully open
Stability AIUnited Kingdom · open image models
Stable DiffusionStableLMmixed
Snapshot 2025-09. Names, versions, and licences move quickly, and this page will be dated the moment it is stale. Read it with thehistory for the order things happened in, and theglossary for the terms.