I saw the news that Grok 2.5 had been open-sourced, so I checked Hugging Face right away.

I saw the news that Grok 2.5 had been open-sourced, so I checked Hugging Face right away. But calling this “Grok 2 Community License Agreement” open source stretches the term beyond recognition. https://lnkd.in/gJZJiwSf

Because it imposes an AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) compliance obligation (Sections 2(a) and 5), prohibits using the Materials, Derivatives, or Outputs to train, create, or improve other foundation/general-purpose AI (Section 2(b)), and requires a conspicuous “Powered by xAI” attribution (Section 3), it violates the Open Source Initiative (OSI) ‘s Open Source Definition. Therefore, it is not Open Source.

Up to this point, it’s the familiar refrain we’ve heard about U.S. Big Tech in recent years.

There are two other points in this Grok 2 Community License Agreement that are quite odd.

1️⃣ First, there’s a clause providing for immediate termination if you exceed the “Permitted Commercial Threshold” (Section 7). What exactly is that threshold? It isn’t defined anywhere in the body of the license. The wording could be read as giving xAI discretion to revoke the license for reasons other than breach of the stated conditions, but it may simply be a mistake from trying to mimic the Llama license.

2️⃣ Second, even though Section 4 states that “no restrictions are imposed on Outputs,” Section 2(b) prohibits training using outputs. The license text contradicts itself; as noted above, this looks like a failed attempt to copy language from another license. While the likely interpretation is that the specific prohibition in Section 2(b) would prevail over Section 4, there are certainly clearer ways to draft this.

Given that OpenAI has released models under an Apache-2.0 + Usage Policy license, publishing a model that—like Llama—is comparatively difficult to use seems of limited value. Frankly, xAI might want to hire experts who actually know how to draft licenses.