OpenRAIL license

How an OpenRAIL license works

An OpenRAIL license has three parts.

• A wide grant. CreativeML OpenRAIL-M gives a “perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license”.
• Use restrictions. A set of uses in Attachment A that the license prevents. CreativeML OpenRAIL-M has 11, for example harm to minors and medical advice.
• A pass-on rule. Each licensee must put the restrictions in their own license “as an enforceable provision”.

The pass-on rule works like copyleft. The RAIL Initiative says the restrictions “also apply to any derivatives of AI artifact”.

What OpenRAIL changes for security and legal teams

An OpenRAIL license puts duties on your service, not only on the model file. A team must find these duties before it releases a service that uses the model.

In practice: 4 duties to check in an OpenRAIL-M model

1. Restricted uses. Compare Attachment A with what your service does. CreativeML OpenRAIL-M prevents “medical advice and medical results interpretation”.
2. Pass-on. Your terms of use must give the same restrictions to your users.
3. Derivatives. Fine-tuned, merged or distilled models keep the restrictions.
4. Updates. CreativeML OpenRAIL-M lets the licensor “restrict (remotely or otherwise) usage of the Model”. It also tells you to make “reasonable efforts to use the latest version”. BigCode OpenRAIL-M removed the latest version duty.

How to find OpenRAIL models

A model card usually shows the license. The Hugging Face Hub uses these license identifiers:

• openrail, the family
• bigscience-openrail-m and bigscience-bloom-rail-1.0
• creativeml-openrail-m
• bigcode-openrail-m
• openrail++

What the name tells you

The RAIL Initiative published the naming convention on 18 August 2022.

Part	Meaning
Open	No charge, and you can relicense, if the restrictions stay
D	Data
A	Application, binary, service, or other non-source form
M	Model and parameters
S	Source code, with libraries and toolkits

Three OpenRAIL-M licenses

License	Model	Notable point
BigScience OpenRAIL-M	BLOOM, 176B parameters	Made for the BLOOM model of BigScience
CreativeML OpenRAIL-M, 22 Aug 2022	Stable Diffusion	11 restricted uses, remote restriction clause
BigCode OpenRAIL-M	StarCoder, StarCoderBase	Adds a malware restriction, removes the latest version duty

Who enforces the restrictions

Enforcement is not automatic. The RAIL FAQ calls the license “your statement to potential users on how you would like them to use your model”.

• Court action is “an option, but not the only one”.
• The FAQ also names a takedown request to the platform that hosts the model.

The idea comes from research by Contractor and colleagues (ACM FAccT 2022). They wrote that ethical guidelines “are not easily enforceable”, and proposed “legally enforceable behavioral use conditions on software and code”.

Where definitions disagree: is OpenRAIL open?

The two sides use the word “open” differently.

• The RAIL Initiative. OpenRAIL licenses are open because they let you use, distribute, commercialize and adapt the artifact. The restricted uses stay out.
• The Open Source Initiative. The Open Source AI Definition 1.0 requires the freedom to use a system “for any purpose and without having to ask for permission”.

The licensors agree on the result. The RAIL FAQ says: “THESE ARE NOT OPEN SOURCE LICENSES, based on the definition used by Open Source Initiative.” BigCode says the same about its license. An OpenRAIL model can be an open weight model, but it is not open source AI under the OSI definition.

Questions and answers

Is an OpenRAIL license open source?

No, not under the Open Source Initiative definition. The RAIL Initiative and BigCode say this. The Open Source AI Definition 1.0 gives the freedom to use a system "for any purpose and without having to ask for permission". An OpenRAIL license prevents some uses, so it does not give that freedom.

Can you use an OpenRAIL-M model in a commercial product?

Usually yes. The RAIL Initiative says OpenRAIL licenses let you use, distribute and commercialize the artifact, but not for the restricted uses. Read the full license text. CreativeML OpenRAIL-M, for example, prevents medical advice and makes you give the restrictions to your users.

What does the M in OpenRAIL-M mean?

M means the license is for a model and its parameters. The RAIL naming convention also uses D for data, A for apps and binaries, and S for source code.