World Model Licensing & Commercial Use

Three different questions get conflated constantly in this space: is a model open source, can it be used commercially, and is that commercial use unrestricted? They don't imply each other. A model can be open source and still forbid commercial use. A model can allow commercial use while being entirely closed. And "commercial use allowed" frequently comes with real conditions — revenue thresholds, user-count caps, geographic exclusions, or account tiers — that a flat yes/no badge would hide.

Real examples from this catalogue

Alaya-EVOKE is genuinely open source — its core repository is Apache 2.0. But every shipped recipe requires ViGeo, a depth-estimation dependency licensed CC-BY-NC-4.0 (non-commercial). Verified directly against the repository's LICENSE file and Hugging Face model card, EVOKE's commercial use is recorded as not permitted — open source alone didn't make that true.

HY-World 2.0 and HY-World 1.5 allow commercial use for free — up to 1 million monthly active users, and not at all in the EU, UK, or South Korea (verified directly against the repository's own license text). Above that threshold, a separate agreement with Tencent is required.

Marble's commercial rights depend on account tier: free-tier output stays personal/non-commercial use only, while paid tiers and API access carry commercial rights under World Labs' own Terms of Service.

OpenDreamer's training and inference code is publicly visible on GitHub — but the repository itself currently states "All rights reserved," with a formal license still pending. Publicly visible code is not the same as a license granting any rights at all.

Marionette's code framework is Apache 2.0, but its trained weights are released for non-commercial research use only — the permissive code license doesn't extend to the model you'd actually need to run it.

Models by commercial-use status

Grouped directly from each Model's verified commercial_use field and license notes — the same logic every individual Model page already uses. A model appears under "not sufficiently verified" when QuantWorlds hasn't confirmed its commercial-use status, never because it's assumed to disallow it.

Commercial use permitted (1)

Matrix-Game 3.0Skywork AI

Open source · MIT

Commercial use permitted, with conditions (8)

Cosmos 3NVIDIA

Open source · OpenMDW-1.1

Linux Foundation permissive AI-model license, adopted by NVIDIA for the Cosmos family. No field-of-use restrictions; redistribution must preserve the license text and original copyright/origin notices. Verified directly against the official github.com/NVIDIA/cosmos README and the Linux Foundation's own OpenMDW documentation.

HY-World 1.5 (WorldPlay)Tencent Hunyuan

Open source · Tencent HY-WorldPlay Community License Agreement

Free to use, including commercially, below 1,000,000 monthly active users; above that threshold, written permission from Tencent is required. Does not apply in the EU, UK, or South Korea. Verified directly from the repository's own License.txt.

HY-World 2.0Tencent Hunyuan

Open source · Tencent HY-World 2.0 Community License Agreement

LTX-2.5Lightricks

Open source · LTX-2 Community License Agreement

Free for commercial use by entities with under $10M annual revenue; entities above that threshold require a separate paid Commercial Use Agreement with Lightricks. Transfer of fine-tunes may also require a paid license. Verified directly from the model's license terms.

Marble 1.0 DraftWorld Labs

Not open source · World Labs Terms of Service

Commercial usage rights depend on account tier: Free-tier output carries more restricted rights; Pro ($35/mo) and Max ($95/mo) paid tiers include commercial rights, and API access carries its own commercial-purpose terms. See docs.worldlabs.ai/terms-of-service.

Marble 1.1World Labs

Not open source · World Labs Terms of Service

Marble 1.1 PlusWorld Labs

Not open source · World Labs Terms of Service

Waypoint-1.5Overworld

Open source · Apache 2.0

Standard Apache 2.0 terms. The model card also documents an acceptable-use policy (prohibits illegal/harmful content, safety-critical/surveillance deployment, IP infringement) — a conduct restriction, not a commercial-use restriction.

Commercial use not permitted (3)

Alaya-EVOKEAlaya Lab

Open source · Apache 2.0

Core EVOKE repository code is Apache 2.0 (verified directly against the LICENSE file at github.com/AlayaLab/Evoke). However, ViGeo — the depth backend required by every shipped recipe (not optional; only the alternative Depth-Anything-3 backend is optional) — ships under CC-BY-NC-4.0, a non-commercial license, per the official Hugging Face model card and GitHub README, which state verbatim: “Both depth backends ship under CC-BY-NC-4.0, which is more restrictive than this repo’s Apache-2.0. Check their licences before any commercial use.” Because ViGeo is mandatory to run EVOKE as shipped, genuine commercial use of the working system is not permitted without separately licensing ViGeo. commercial_use is recorded as false to reflect this, consistent with how this catalogue treats other Apache-licensed models with a non-commercial mandatory dependency.

MarionetteAlaya Lab

Apache 2.0 (code) / non-commercial research only (weights)

The code framework is Apache 2.0, but the trained model weights and runtime assets derive from the WildWorld dataset and are explicitly released for non-commercial research use only, not redistributable — so the usable model itself cannot be used commercially even though its code license is permissive. Verified directly from the repository's own README license section.

OpenDreamerReactor

The training and inference code is publicly visible on GitHub (github.com/next-state/open-dreamer and github.com/reactor-team/open-dreamer), but both repositories currently state verbatim: "All rights reserved. See LICENSE. This is a temporary notice; a formal license is expected in a future release." No open-source or commercial license is currently granted, despite the project being widely described elsewhere as "open-sourced." Training/inference code is publicly available; trained model weights are NOT currently distributed anywhere — running OpenDreamer requires training your own checkpoint or supplying one you already have.

Not sufficiently verified (10)

Agora-1Odyssey