---
id: "2023-07-18-llama-2"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-07-18-llama-2/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2023-07-18"
date_precision: day
category: open-source
importance: 4
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 2
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-07-18-llama-2/

# Meta releases Llama 2 with a commercial-use license

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.

## 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.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): in its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): in its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): in its training data
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): in its training data

## Sources

1. [Meta and Microsoft Introduce the Next Generation of Llama (Meta)](https://about.fb.com/news/2023/07/llama-2/) (about.fb.com, official)
2. [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models (arXiv)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09288) (arxiv.org, paper)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

## Related

- 2024-07-23: [Llama 3.1 405B: the first frontier-class open-weights model](https://postcutoff.com/e/2024-07-23-llama-3-1-405b/index.md)
- 2023-02-24: [Meta releases LLaMA, sparking the open-weights LLM wave](https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-02-24-llama/index.md)