Open weights

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Open weights are the publicly released learned parameters of a trained artificial intelligence model, principally its weights and biases. In an artificial neural network, weights are numerical values that determine how strongly inputs contribute to the network's calculations. Publishing these values allows others to download and use the model, while permission to modify, fine-tune or redistribute it depends on its license. The term is commonly applied to large language models, diffusion models and other generative artificial intelligence. Open weights is contrasted to open-source artificial intelligence, which considers the public release of not only parameters but the model's source code, training data, evaluation results, intermediate checkpoints and technical documentation. Open weights AI is a major issue in geopolitics and artificial intelligence controversies, sometimes characterized as an AI arms race or AI Cold War between the US and China. Broadly, models released by Chinese companies, such as DeepSeek, Alibaba Cloud, Moonshot AI and Z.ai, use an open weights framework, under more permissive software licenses like Apache or MIT. United States AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, SpaceXAI, and Meta Superintelligence Labs, favor a proprietary software framework, especially for larger models. These are in part national government policy decisions, because public access to AI technology has many consequences. Some US politicians have called to restrict US public access to Chinese AI tools. Popular open-source artificial intelligence project categories include large language models (LLM), machine translation tools, and chatbots. Debate over the benefits and risks of open-sourced AI involve a range of factors like security, privacy and technological advancement. As of July 2026, the largest open weight frontier model is Kimi K3, developed by Moonshot AI, at 2.8 trillion parameters, followed by Alibaba Cloud's Qwen3.8 at 2.4 trillion parameters. Open weights releases outside China are led by US lab Thinking Machines Lab, Nvidia's...