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text-llm · Openness profile

OpenAI gpt-oss (120b / 20b)

OpenAI · snapshot 2026-11-07

Open-weight models - deliberately not called open source, and not 'ChatGPT OSS'.

Tier 3 Practical open-weight

What the publisher claims: open-weight

The one-liner: Highly usable open-weight model with Apache 2.0 weights but incomplete training openness.

The six questions

A AccessScore 3 of 3

Both checkpoints are downloadable from Hugging Face and GitHub and were built to run locally, from a laptop upward.

P PermissionScore 3 of 3

Apache 2.0 on the weights, with a usage policy sitting alongside that does not withdraw or condition the software grant; commercial use, modification, and redistribution are permitted.

D DeploymentScore 3 of 3

Designed for local and independent deployment with hardware-optimized builds for consumer GPUs and support across vLLM, Ollama, LM Studio, and major clouds.

T TransparencyScore 1 of 3

The dataset is described at a high level along with architecture, tokenizer, post-training approach, and safety evaluation, but no reproducible training corpus or recipe is published.

R ReproducibilityScore 1 of 3

Limited to moderate: the training data and full training pipeline are not released, so an equivalent system can be approximated but not rebuilt.

G Governance & ParticipationScore 1 of 3

OpenAI's openai/gpt-oss repository accepts a small number of merged outside pull requests to the reference implementations and harmony tooling, but the model, its post-training, and the release decision are entirely OpenAI's.

License

Apache 2.0 on the weights plus a separate gpt-oss usage policy OSI-approved — license source ↗

What is actually released

Why it matters

The gap between a permissive weight release and fully open AI, stated in OpenAI's own deliberately precise wording - and, as of late 2026, still the only open-weight release OpenAI has made, alongside the gpt-oss-safeguard models.

Sources

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.

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