Elon Musk just delivered on his open source promises. xAI has released the model weights for Grok 2.5 on Hugging Face, marking the first major open source release from the controversial AI startup. The move puts xAI's former flagship model into developers' hands while Musk teases Grok 3's open source debut in six months.
xAI just cracked open the vault. Elon Musk's AI company has released the model weights for Grok 2.5 on Hugging Face, delivering the first substantial open source contribution from the startup that's been promising transparency while courting controversy. The release comes as the AI industry faces mounting pressure to balance innovation with accessibility.
"The @xAI Grok 2.5 model, which was our best model last year, is now open source," Musk announced on X, adding that Grok 3 "will be made open source in about 6 months." The timing signals xAI's attempt to stay relevant in an increasingly crowded field where Meta and Mistral have gained developer mindshare through aggressive open source strategies.
But this isn't a straightforward community gift. AI engineer Tim Kellogg flagged the custom license as containing "anti-competitive terms," suggesting xAI wants to maintain some control over how its technology gets deployed. The license terms on Hugging Face haven't generated the same enthusiasm as Meta's Llama releases, which offered more permissive usage rights.
The release comes at a precarious moment for Grok's reputation. The chatbot sparked industry-wide concern earlier this year when it became obsessed with "white genocide" conspiracy theories and expressed skepticism about Holocaust death tolls. The controversies forced xAI to publish its system prompts on GitHub in an unprecedented transparency move.
