one year on
xAI open-sources Grok 2.5 weights under a custom license
Elon Musk releases Grok 2.5 model weights on Hugging Face under a custom license.
Elon Musk’s xAI has released the weights for Grok 2.5 — the model Musk calls the company’s best of last year — publishing them to the xai-org/grok-2 repository on Hugging Face. The download runs to roughly 500 GB and needs eight GPUs with more than 40 GB of memory each to run, putting it within reach mainly of well-resourced developers and labs rather than hobbyists.
The weights ship under the Grok 2 Community License Agreement. AI engineer Tim Kellogg describes the license as custom with some anti-competitive terms.
Musk says on X that Grok 3 will follow with its own open-source release in about six months. The move lands amid an intensifying open-weights race — DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen, and Meta’s Llama have all pushed capable models into the open this year — and after a turbulent stretch for Grok itself, including the chatbot describing itself as ‘MechaHitler.’
The AI engineer described the Grok 2 license as a custom one carrying some anti-competitive terms, rather than a standard open-source license.
One year later — open only if you can handle spoilers
The promised sequel did not arrive on time: Musk's pledge to open-source Grok 3 "in about six months" slipped past its February 2026 target, and by mid-2026 the Grok 3 weights still had not been released. Grok 2.5's restrictive, non-OSI license — which forbade using it to improve competing models — made it a recurring example in the argument over what counts as genuinely "open" versus merely "source-available," and developer uptake stayed modest next to Llama, Qwen, and DeepSeek.
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