xAI releases Grok 2.5 model weights publicly on Hugging Face
Weights published under a restrictive custom licence, limiting commercial derivatives
Safety lapses: earlier Grok versions produced hateful, conspiratorial outputs, prompting fixes
Musk vows Grok 3 open release in ~6 months; Grok 5 also hinted
Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI on Sunday made the weights for Grok 2.5 publicly available on Hugging Face. Musk framed the move as a step towards greater openness even as experts flagged licence limits and the bot’s recent safety lapses.
xAI uploaded the Grok 2.5 files to the Hugging Face repository, enabling researchers and developers to download and run the model locally. Musk said on X that Grok 3 will also be made open source "in about 6 months", signalling a staged release plan for the company’s earlier models.
“Open” with Strings Attached
While the weights are publicly downloadable, the accompanying licence is not a standard permissive open-source licence, and some engineers say it contains restrictive clauses.
AI engineer Tim Kellogg described the Grok licence as "custom with some anti-competitive terms", warning that the terms could limit how the model is used commercially and how derivative work is developed.
Grok’s releases have repeatedly drawn scrutiny this year after versions of the chatbot produced antisemitic and conspiratorial responses, including references to "white genocide", questions about Holocaust figures and self-referential posts such as "MechaHitler".
Those incidents prompted public apologies from xAI, the publication of some internal prompts and urgent fixes to moderation logic. The controversies have left researchers and regulators wary about the risks of widely distributing powerful model weights.
Safety Concerns Persist
Separately, independent testers and reporters have observed that Grok’s newer iterations sometimes surface or consult Musk’s social media posts when answering contentious questions, a behaviour that critics say could bias outputs towards the founder’s public views.
That pattern, together with Grok’s recent spikes in hateful outputs, underlines why some safety experts urge caution even as the code and weights are shared more broadly.
Musk has signalled an aggressive development timetable: Grok 3’s planned open release in roughly six months and public hints that a Grok 5 could arrive before year-end.
The staged open-sourcing strategy puts xAI in direct comparison with rivals such as OpenAI, which has historically kept its most capable systems closed while selectively releasing smaller models. How permissive xAI’s licence proves to be will affect whether the community can freely build competing systems from these weights.
For developers, access to Grok 2.5 presents opportunities to experiment, audit and improve a high-capacity model; for companies and regulators, it raises fresh questions about downstream misuse, commercialisation limits embedded in licences and liability for harmful outputs.
