Licensing
Two different things get licensed on this site, and they are not licensed the same way. The models you download are other people's work under their terms, which include 4 different licenses across the catalog. The tools I publish are mine, and they are MIT or Apache-2.0.
This page is a plain reading of the licenses, not legal advice. For anything commercial, read the license text yourself and take advice.
Ultralytics YOLO models are AGPL-3.0
That is the single most important line on this page, because it covers most of the weights people come here for. AGPL-3.0 is a strong copyleft license: you may use, modify and distribute the work commercially, but if you do, the complete corresponding source of your application has to be offered under the same license to everyone who uses it, including over a network. Serving a model behind an API counts.
For research, teaching, evaluation and open-source projects this costs you nothing and is exactly what the license is for. For a closed-source commercial product it is a real constraint, and the way through it is an Ultralytics Enterprise license, which they sell for precisely this case.
Please check the terms against your own use before you build on a checkpoint from here. Nothing on this site grants you rights to someone else's model, and a mirror or a download button is not a license.
Models you download here
The checkpoints in the model zoo are other people's work, mirrored and documented. Their licenses are theirs, and they differ family by family.
- Ultralytics YOLO (YOLO26, YOLO11, YOLO12, YOLOv8, YOLOv5u, YOLOE and the seg/pose/obb variants)
- AGPL-3.0. Free for open-source work, research and evaluation. A closed-source product needs an Ultralytics Enterprise license.
- RT-DETR, Segment Anything, Depth Anything
- Apache-2.0 on the weights themselves. Permissive, but loading them through the Ultralytics package brings that package's AGPL terms to your application.
- YOLOv9, YOLO-World
- GPL-3.0. Copyleft, without AGPL's network clause.
- MobileCLIP
- MIT. The text encoder YOLOE uses for prompts.
Tools published here
The things I built. These are mine to license, and they are licensed so you can use them without asking.
- CVFlow
- MIT, on GitHub and PyPI. Use it, fork it, ship it, no conditions beyond keeping the notice.
- Redact
- Free for macOS, with no account and no limits. It bundles an Ultralytics YOLO26 segmentation model, so if you are redacting video for a commercial product, read the Ultralytics license as it applies to your use.
- ONNX visualizer
- Free to use in the browser, with no account. Diagrams, reports and videos it exports are yours, including for commercial and academic publication; each carries a small credit badge back to the tool.
Licensing questions
- Are Ultralytics YOLO models free to use commercially?
- Only under AGPL-3.0 terms. AGPL-3.0 permits commercial use, but it requires that the complete corresponding source of your application, including anything that links to the model or serves it over a network, is made available under the same license to its users. If you cannot or will not release that source, Ultralytics sells an Enterprise license for exactly this case. Which one you need is a question about your product, not about the download, so read the license and take advice if there is money involved.
- Which model weights on this site are not AGPL-3.0?
- Several. RT-DETR is Apache-2.0, the Segment Anything family is Apache-2.0, Apple's MobileCLIP text encoder is MIT, and YOLOv9 and YOLO-World are GPL-3.0 rather than AGPL. Every family page on the model weights catalog shows the exact license for that family's checkpoints with a link to the license text, and flags where running a permissively licensed model through the Ultralytics package pulls AGPL terms back in anyway.
- Does using a model through the Ultralytics Python package change the license?
- It can, and this is the part people miss. A checkpoint may be permissively licensed on its own while the code you load it with is AGPL-3.0. If your application imports the Ultralytics package, the package's terms apply to your application regardless of how the weights themselves are licensed. The model weights pages call this out per family for that reason.
- What license are the tools on this site under?
- CVFlow is MIT. The tools published here are released under MIT or Apache-2.0, and the browser tools such as the ONNX visualizer are free to use with no account. Where a paid feature exists it is minimal and additive: the free version is not a demo of the paid one.
- Can I use the diagrams and reports these tools export?
- Yes, including commercially and in published papers. An export carries a small credit badge linking back to the tool it came from, and that is the whole ask: the tools are free and have no account, and the credit line is how they get found. The model you exported is yours and is never uploaded.
- Can I reuse the articles, benchmarks and code snippets?
- Code snippets in the articles are yours to use. For the prose, figures and benchmark tables, quote what you need with a link back rather than republishing a piece wholesale. If you want to translate or syndicate something in full, ask first and the answer is usually yes.
Unsure which license applies to what you are building? Ask on a free call. It is a question worth answering before the code is written, not after.