In August 2025, xAI released the weights of Grok 2, the model the company had used as its flagship in 2024. The official model card on Hugging Face states, “This repository contains the weights of Grok 2, a model trained and used at xAI in 2024,” with the initial commit dated August 22, 2025. The release weighed roughly 500 GB across 42 files and required substantial hardware to run, listed as eight GPUs with more than 40 GB of memory each using tensor parallelism.
The weights were published under the Grok 2 Community License Agreement rather than a fully permissive license, allowing research and non-commercial use with conditions on commercial deployment, and explicitly prohibiting using Grok 2 to develop or train other large AI models. The release followed xAI’s earlier open-weights release of Grok 1 in 2024.
The Grok 2 open release mattered as another major lab choosing to publish a once-frontier model after newer systems superseded it, a pattern of delayed openness that lets the research community study and build on capable models while labs keep their current best behind APIs.