Open, Except for Europe: The AI Models Whose Licenses Lock Out the EU

What this is about

The model pages on Hugging Face say “Open Weights,” and the files download with a single click. But more and more license texts effectively say: “not for the EU.” Several such models arrived within a single week: Baidu's ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base on November 5, the MiniMax derivative HyperFlow H3 Flash on November 6 and MiniMax-H3-Image on November 10. Meanwhile, Reddit users are showing off H3 videos they generated locally, one of them on an RTX 3050 with 6 GB.

We read the license files of the most important open models from recent months ourselves. Our questions: Who locks Europe out? What exactly is prohibited? Does the ban also cover fine-tunes and GGUF files? And what does it mean for a ComfyUI hobbyist in Cologne or a startup in Berlin? Up front: this is a journalistic analysis, not legal advice.

The traffic light: who excludes Europe

MiniMax H3 defines the “Applicable Territory” as “worldwide, excluding the Excluded Territories.” Those are the EU, the UK, South Korea and the US. Section V.4 prohibits anyone from using, reproducing, modifying, distributing or displaying the “MiniMax H3 Works or their Outputs” outside that territory. At the same time, MiniMax claims no rights to the videos you generate. H3-Image uses the same list of territories. On top of that, you need written permission once your annual revenue exceeds $1 million or if you offer a hosted service to third parties.

ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base excludes the EU, the UK and South Korea (§ 1.11). Under § 5.3, the model, its derivatives and its outputs may not be “used, reproduced, modified, distributed or displayed” there. Outputs explicitly include “text, images, audio, video, code.” The license is governed by Hong Kong law. According to drweb.de, Switzerland isn't excluded. Going by the wording, the same applies to Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, which are in the EEA but not the EU.

Huawei's openPangu 2.0 Pro goes furthest. Anyone who uses it agrees not to “access, download, install, run, deploy, integrate, modify or otherwise use” the model within the EU.

Llama 4 works differently. For the multimodal models, individuals living in the EU and companies headquartered there get no rights, no matter where the compute runs. But end users of a product that has the models built in are explicitly exempt. With ERNIE and MiniMax, on the other hand, what counts is where the model is used, not where the company is based.

Do derivatives and GGUFs inherit the ban?

Yes, and explicitly so. Section III of the H3 license requires modifications and derivative models to comply with the license, “including the provisions on the Applicable Territory.” You can't add other terms. Even a model created through distillation counts as a derivative, meaning a smaller model that learned from the big model's outputs.

With HyperFlow H3 Flash, this leads to a misunderstanding. Video Rebirth's GitHub repo says “Apache License 2.0,” but that only applies to the code. According to the Model Card, the weights are “a Model Derivative of MiniMax-H3” and explicitly don't cover use in the EU. The same goes for Pika H3 Flex: Pika's LoRA adapters, small add-on weights that tweak a model's behavior, also fall under the MiniMax license.

The community quantizations only mention the license in their metadata. The card for Abiray/MiniMax-H3-Pruned-GGUF names the MiniMax license but says nothing about the territorial ban. For joeygambino/MiniMax-H3-GGUF, the license appears only in the metadata field. If you just read the Model Card, you won't learn about the ban. ERNIE explicitly counts fine-tuning, quantization (shrinking a model by storing its numbers at lower precision) and merging as “Derivative Models.”

Technically, nothing is blocked. The model pages for MiniMax-H3, Comfy-Org/MiniMax-H3 and Comfy-Org/MiniMax-H3-Image have no access gate. According to Hugging Face, Comfy-Org/MiniMax-H3 was downloaded 32.9 million times last month, and Abiray's GGUF 940,406 times. The platform counts file requests, not people, and doesn't break the numbers down by country. So there's no way to say how many of those users are in the EU.

What reasons the vendors give

Only MiniMax explains the ban. Its license FAQ says video generation is subject to stricter and fast-changing rules, for example around generating real faces, copyright and content safety. The AI Act is already being enforced, it says, but the practical requirements for video and face models are still being worked out. For the US, MiniMax points to ongoing copyright litigation: Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery have been suing the company in federal court in California since September 2025 over its video app Hailuo. The explanation: anyone can run and modify open weights independently, while safeguards exist only in MiniMax's own API. The API is meant to stay available worldwide. The license FAQ promises:

The current restriction means “not yet,” not “never.”

Organizations can apply for an individual license via a form. In the license discussion on Hugging Face, a user from Germany asked whether private individuals can do this too, since the form asks for a company name. There's no visible reply from MiniMax. Another question also went unanswered: whether uploading an H3 video to YouTube already counts as “displaying” it in the EU.

Baidu gives no reason, as drweb.de, trendingtopics.eu and the Korean blog Pebblous all note. Huawei is silent too. In 2024, Meta called regulation “unpredictable” when it restricted the multimodal Llama 3.2 models.

What this means legally, in practice

Are the weights even protected? That's an open question. Legal scholar Nuno Sousa e Silva writes on the Kluwer Copyright Blog that it's “unclear” whether models are protected by copyright. Weights are numbers produced during training, with no human shaping their form. The strongest candidate is the EU database right. But under Art. 11 of the Database Directive, it only applies to makers based in the EU. US legal scholars Henderson and Lemley consider weights and outputs “largely uncopyrightable,” which makes many terms of use hard to enforce. Purely AI-generated images and videos generally aren't protected in Germany either.

Our take: For Chinese vendors, contract law is about all that's left in the EU. That's contradictory, because their license explicitly doesn't want to apply there. There are no court rulings on this yet. If you rely on this gap, you're betting on an unsettled legal situation.

For hobbyists: We found no cases of a vendor enforcing such a clause against private individuals. On Hacker News, commenters mostly describe these clauses as a “legal safeguard” for the vendors. Still, it's not entirely risk-free. If you show results publicly or redistribute fine-tunes, you're visibly acting outside the license as written.

For startups: This is where it gets serious. According to drweb.de, a company that fine-tunes ERNIE on a server in Frankfurt is acting “outside the rights granted.” Then there's the AI Act. In paragraph 56 of its guidelines, the European Commission writes that if a provider “clearly and unambiguously” excludes distribution and use in the EU, whoever integrates the model into an AI system for the EU market becomes the model's provider. That company would then have obligations including technical documentation, a copyright policy and a summary of training data it barely knows anything about. The open-source exemption under Art. 53(2) doesn't help here. According to the guidelines, a license only counts as free if it permits access, use, modification and redistribution, and even user thresholds disqualify it.

Our back-of-the-envelope classification: 6 × 14 billion active parameters × 33.5 trillion training tokens gives roughly 2.8 × 10²⁴ operations for ERNIE. That's above the Commission's threshold for general-purpose AI models (10²³) and below the threshold for systemic risk (10²⁵). The numbers for MiniMax H3 aren't available. But the guidelines explicitly include text-to-video models.

A trend? Yes, but not a uniform one

According to a Hugging Face analysis, of 178 Chinese releases above 20 billion parameters this year, 59 percent were under Apache 2.0 and 22 percent under MIT. On October 11, the overview site mrkt30 counted nine major models with MIT or Apache, seven with custom terms and three without an EU license. ERNIE 5.5 and H3-Image have been added since. But there's movement in the other direction too: Tencent removed the EU ban from the Hy3 preview with the final Apache version in July.

Two patterns stand out. First, at MiniMax only the image and video models get a territorial clause. The company's own text model, MiniMax M3, has none, just a $20 million revenue threshold. That fits the rationale about faces and copyright. Second, business thresholds are becoming more common: Kimi K3, GLM-5.3, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next and MiniMax M3 require separate agreements above certain revenue levels or for hosted services.

China is also planning its own controls. On October 16, the commerce and science ministries published a draft proposing export controls on 23 AI technologies. It would cover models above 10²⁶ operations, above 2 trillion parameters or in the global top 10. According to The Decoder, open-source releases would get an “automatic license,” and comments are open until November 15. Dean W. Ball (OpenAI) sees this as a way to “switch off at will” future open models. The analysis “AI Safety in China,” on the other hand, considers an end to open models unlikely. According to it, DeepSeek and MiniMax have already registered provisionally.

The bottom line

“Open Weights” isn't a legal term. It only describes that the file is publicly downloadable. Europe still has plenty of green alternatives: DeepSeek, GLM-5.3-Flash, Hy3 and Hy4 Preview, and the small Qwen models. Video and image models are a different story. There, the strongest open model right now, plus all its derivatives, sits in the red column.

Our take: for individuals, the risk is mostly theoretical. For companies, it's real. That's less about the threat of lawsuits from China than about two other consequences: a company can become a model provider itself under the AI Act, and customers or investors will ask about the license during due diligence. It remains to be seen whether MiniMax keeps its “not yet, not never” promise. It's also unclear whether Baidu's retrained ERNIE version, due by November 25, and the final Hy4 weights will come with a territorial clause again. At Tencent, criticism has already led to an open license once.