A US giant reportedly swapping GPT for a Chinese open-source model made headlines this week. The deal is the news. But if you build AI models, the real story is somewhere else.
Here is a counter-intuitive point I keep making to founders: an open-source license that says "free to use" is still a contract. The moment you publish those weights, an agreement kicks in between you and every user on earth. It is not a charity notice.
Model export is not product export. When you ship a product, you control the endpoint. When you open-source a model, the only thing you still control is that one license file.
Three layers actually matter:
- What you gave away. A permissive license (Apache-style) is close to letting go. A custom "community license" keeps a lot of restrictions — and a lot of leverage. Meta's Llama license, for example, requires a separate grant once a company passes 700 million monthly active users. That single clause is the commercial boundary hiding under the word "open."
- The liability chain. If a downstream company uses your model to generate infringing or unlawful output, can it trace back to you? It turns on two things: whether your disclaimer is drafted tightly, and whether your training data is clean. Dirty data can sink even a beautiful disclaimer.
- Dual regulation. On the China side, algorithm/model export triggers filing and content-safety duties. On the other side, there are export controls and data-localization thresholds. A Chinese model running inside foreign infrastructure sits between two rulebooks at once.
I come from a CS background, so I read a license the way an engineer reads a spec — I open the model card and the acceptable-use annex, not just the legal clauses. The liability boundary usually lives in that annex, and it is exactly the part most people skip.
If you are about to open-source a model, or yours is already being embedded in someone else's product, send me the license you are running. I will flag which lines are the landmines.
What is the hardest part for your team — the license terms, or the dual-regulation exposure?
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Mike Wu, China-licensed Attorney · Cross-border practice
4 languages (CN/EN/ES/JA)
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