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What are open-weights models?
Last reviewed July 16, 2026
An open-weights model is one whose trained weights are published for download, so anyone can run it on their own hardware or a provider of their choice. That is weaker than open source: full open source would also cover training code and data under an approved license, while open-weights releases often ship under custom licenses that may restrict commercial use, scale, or fields of use. Downloadable weights are what enable local inference and competitive hosting.
What a weights license can restrict
Read the license, not the headline: some open-weights licenses are permissive (the Apache-2.0 class), others cap monthly active users, require attribution, forbid training competitors on outputs, or reserve commercial rights. The word open in a model's name tells you nothing enforceable. For a business, the license text is the capability.
Why open weights matter economically
Downloadable weights break the single-vendor lock: many providers host the same model and compete on price and speed, and you can always exit to your own hardware. That is why open-weight flagships are often served far cheaper than closed peers of similar capability, and why they anchor local and private deployments.
idapt's catalog carries open-weight and closed models side by side, routes open-weight models across competing providers cheapest-first, and runs the local-sized ones on your own machine.
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