Side-by-side comparison of DeepSeek R1 (DeepSeek · China) and Grok-2 (xAI · USA) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. DeepSeek R1 is rated conditional; Grok-2 is conditional. They part ways on licence: DeepSeek R1 is "MIT", Grok-2 is "Grok 2 Community".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | Conditional Frontier reasoning model at o1-class performance. MIT licence makes weights legally clean. Same Chinese-origin alignment/supply-chain considerations as DeepSeek V3. Distilled Qwen/Llama versions inherit their base licence. | Conditional xAI's first open-weights release. Commercial use allowed under the Grok 2 Community License with xAI's Acceptable Use Policy. Notable restriction: weights cannot be used to train other models (distillation ban). 500GB model, needs 8 GPUs with 40GB+. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-15 | 2026-04-16 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | MIT | Grok 2 Community |
| Commercial use | Yes | Yes (w/ AUP) |
| Training data | Undisclosed | Undisclosed |
| Origin | China | USA |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 27/100 | 14/100 |
| Speed | — | — |
| Blended price | $2.36/M | — |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.