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Open weights stopped asking permission — of the forty most downloaded models, only Meta's still need an account

We read the licence of every repository in the forty most downloaded text-generation models on Hugging Face today, 25 August 2026, and checked whether the weights can actually be fetched. Two of the forty are gated: Meta's Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, which require an account, an accepted set of terms and manual approval. A third, Google's Gemma 3 1B, is gated for the same reason. Everything else in the list downloads without an account. The change that made this true is recent and belongs to Google. Gemma 3, published under Google's own Gemma Terms of Use, could not be downloaded — or even have its licence text read — without logging in; a request for the file returns HTTP 401. Gemma 4, published on 11 March 2026, is under plain Apache 2.0 and is not gated at all. It is not a marginal model: the 31B instruction-tuned repository alone records 8.79 million downloads in thirty days, more than any other frontier-class open-weight model we track. What remains of bespoke licensing is narrower than its reputation. Moonshot's Kimi K2 carries a "Modified MIT" licence whose only modification is a display duty: a product with more than 100 million monthly active users or more than 20 million dollars in monthly revenue must show the words "Kimi K2" in its interface. DeepSeek-V3, the model on which that lab's whole line stands, is still routinely described as MIT-licensed and is not — its repository ships MIT for the code and a separate DeepSeek License Agreement for the weights. Only from March 2025 did the company put the weights themselves under MIT. One habit is worth flagging for anyone who takes a label at face value. Several heavily downloaded repositories declare a licence in the card metadata and ship no licence file at all, and quantised repacks inherit the label from a model card rather than from the original terms. The label is metadata; the file is the contract. Where the two disagree, only one of them is enforceable.