Meta releases Llama 2 with a commercial-use license
Confirmed
Importance: major (4 of 5)The takeaway
Llama 2 (7B, 13B, 70B) and its chat-tuned variants were released free for research and most commercial use, in partnership with Microsoft, making strong open-weight LLMs available to businesses.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- Major (4 of 5)
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Released 18 July 2023; paper arXiv 2307.09288
- Sizes: 7B, 13B, 70B; trained on 2 trillion tokens
- Llama 2-Chat fine-tuned with RLHF
- License allowed commercial use except for services with >700M monthly users
What happened
Meta openly released a new generation of Llama models with a permissive (though not OSI-open) license.
Why it matters
Legitimized open-weights LLMs in industry and intensified the open vs. closed AI policy debate.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 2 primary
Primary
- Meta and Microsoft Introduce the Next Generation of Llama (Meta)about.fb.com, official
- Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models (arXiv)arxiv.org, paper
Changes
- Filed