Tier 2 Restricted open-weight
What the publisher claims: open-source, open-weight
The one-liner: Open-weight ERNIE exists under Apache 2.0, but the newest release arrives under a bespoke licence.
The six questions
weights downloadable
mixed licences, with the newest flagship under custom use restrictions
standard tooling
architecture, parameters and evals documented; corpus withheld
Limited to moderate.
The ERNIE checkpoints land on Baidu's Hugging Face org with model cards and no development repository, so outside researchers can read and request but cannot contribute code, data, or evaluation.
License
Mixed - Apache 2.0 for ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking and the ERNIE-4.5-VL checkpoints; custom ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base Model License Agreement v1.0 (dated 5 November 2026) for ERNIE-5.5-Flash-Base — license source ↗
- the 5.5 licence is a custom use-restricted agreement with a prohibited-use list including military use, high-stakes automated decisions and professional practice without authorisation
- definition of licensed materials explicitly excludes unreleased training code and data
What is actually released
- weights (ERNIE 4.5 21B-A3B text and VL checkpoints, ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base)
- model cards
- evaluation information
- blog and tech report links; no training data
Why it matters
Shows a large vendor moving from proprietary API-only to a split licence portfolio in a single year.
Sources
- https://huggingface.co/baidu/ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking/raw/main/LICENSE
- https://huggingface.co/baidu/ERNIE-5.5-Flash-Base/raw/main/LICENSE
- https://huggingface.co/api/models?author=baidu
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.