OpenRAIL

OpenRAIL (Open Responsible AI Licenses) is a family of AI-specific licenses that enable open access, use, and distribution of AI models while imposing behavioral restrictions to prevent harmful applications.​

These licenses promote "openness" through royalty-free use, modification, and redistribution (including derivatives), but enforce "responsibility" by prohibiting uses like illegal activities, harm to vulnerable groups, impersonation, or generating deceptive content. Unlike traditional open source licenses, they add use-based clauses tailored to AI risks, such as those from large language models.​

Variants:

1. OpenRAIL-M: Original from the RAIL Initiative (e.g., BigScience BLOOM), with modular restrictions.​
2. OpenRAIL++: Updated for more flexibility, dropping mandatory model updates while keeping core restrictions.​
3. Variants like Qodo Open RAIL++-M apply to multimodal models, requiring derivatives to retain minimum restrictions.​