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
Both checkpoints are downloadable from Hugging Face and GitHub and were built to run locally, from a laptop upward.
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.
Designed for local and independent deployment with hardware-optimized builds for consumer GPUs and support across vLLM, Ollama, LM Studio, and major clouds.
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.
Limited to moderate: the training data and full training pipeline are not released, so an equivalent system can be approximated but not rebuilt.
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 ↗
- A separate usage policy applies alongside Apache 2.0, though it does not condition the software grant
What is actually released
- weights (gpt-oss-120b, gpt-oss-20b)
- architecture description and tokenizer
- model card and system card
- post-training approach description
- harmful fine-tuning evaluations
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
- https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss
- https://openai.com/index/gpt-oss-model-card
- https://github.com/openai/gpt-oss/blob/main/LICENSE
- https://intuitionlabs.ai/articles/openai-gpt-oss-open-weight-models
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.