Tier 2 Restricted open-weight
What the publisher claims: open-source, open-weights
The one-liner: Open video weights whose commercial use is a registration away from a monthly cap.
The six questions
Weights for all major variants are downloadable from the publisher's repositories without gating.
Commercial use is conditioned on registration and a monthly visit ceiling, with use prohibitions and jurisdiction set to PRC law.
Self-hostable, but the 5B-class checkpoints need roughly 40GB of VRAM, so deployment is limited to serious hardware.
Model cards and evaluations are published; the training corpus and recipe are not.
Limited.
Zhipu AI publishes CogVideoX weights and inference code with issue trackers open, but the training pipeline and release direction stay inside the company.
License
The CogVideoX License (with Apache-2.0 on the 2b checkpoint only) — license source ↗
- Commercial use requires registering and obtaining a basic commercial license
- Commercial use is capped at 1 million visits per month before a further commercial license must be negotiated
- Military, illegal, and national-security-related uses are prohibited, and the license notes it may be replaced by a more comprehensive version
- Governed by PRC law with Beijing Haidian District jurisdiction
What is actually released
- weights (2b, 5b, 1.5-5B, I2V variants)
- inference code
- model cards
Why it matters
Registration-plus-cap is a distinct licence design: nothing is hidden, but the right to serve commercially is metered.
Sources
- https://huggingface.co/zai-org/CogVideoX-5b/blob/main/LICENSE
- https://huggingface.co/zai-org/CogVideoX-1.5-5b
- https://ltx.io/blog/open-source-video-generation-models-guide
Derived from the openness dataset behind But Is It Open? — snapshot 2026-11-07 ↗. Scores are qualitative readings of the cited evidence, not verdicts; tier measures openness, not intelligence.