IBM published the same speech model twice — the better one may not be used commercially

IBM has spent two years selling Granite on a single promise: everything under Apache 2.0, no exceptions, no European carve-out, no user thresholds. On 25 August 2026 it published a model that breaks that promise on purpose, and the way it did so is more interesting than the breach. The new Granite Speech 5.0 470M TurboCTC is a small English transcriber — 473 million parameters, built to run on a laptop or a phone. It exists in two versions released the same day. One was trained on roughly 60,000 hours of public audio and carries plain Apache 2.0. The other, marked -nc, was trained on about 75,000 hours and carries CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: research and non-commercial use only. The model card states the restriction in its first line and points commercial users back to the free twin. The extra 14,900 hours explain everything. They come from two corpora, GigaSpeech and SPGI Speech, whose own terms bar commercial reuse. A speech model cannot have a licence more permissive than the recordings it was trained on, so IBM faced a choice that every builder of audio models faces quietly: train on the best available data and restrict the result, or drop the restricted data and ship something slightly weaker to everyone. IBM did both, in public, and labelled which was which. That labelling is the part worth noticing. The common industry practice is the opposite — train on whatever is available, publish under a permissive-sounding licence, and leave the provenance question unanswered. Here the trade-off is written on the box: more data, narrower rights. There is a second signal in the release. This is the first model IBM has published under the Granite 5.0 name, and it is not a flagship language model or a reasoning system. It is a transcriber with no language model in it at all — a bare acoustic encoder that reads out a whole utterance in one pass instead of generating it token by token. IBM's own download figures point the same way: its speech models are pulled down more often than anything in the catalogue except the 8B flagship. Both versions are English-only; the family's multilingual option remains Granite Speech 4.1 2B, which does not cover Polish either.