Side-by-side comparison of Gemma 4 26B A4B Instruct (Google DeepMind · United States) and IBM Granite 4.1 30B (IBM · USA) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. Gemma 4 26B A4B Instruct is rated conditional; IBM Granite 4.1 30B is EU-ready. They part ways on training data: Gemma 4 26B A4B Instruct is "Domain-level summary", IBM Granite 4.1 30B is "Disclosed".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | Conditional Based on published licence terms, Gemma 4 26B A4B ships under pure Apache 2.0 with no prohibited-use carve-outs — a departure from prior Gemma generations. The sparse-MoE architecture (25.2B total / 3.8B active) puts it in an ambiguous zone for EU AI Act GPAI systemic-risk classification, and US origin plus image-input support add transparency obligations that deployers should document. | EU-ready Per the published model card, Granite 4.1 30B is an Apache 2.0 30-billion-parameter dense decoder with a 131k-token context, trained on the same publicly-available + synthetic + human-curated mix that anchors the rest of the Granite family. The larger sibling of Granite 4.1 8B, positioned for enterprise workloads where the 8B class falls short on reasoning depth — same defensible-default profile, with IP indemnification available via watsonx. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-17 | 2026-05-03 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | Apache 2.0 | Apache 2.0 |
| Commercial use | Unrestricted | Unrestricted |
| Training data | Domain-level summary | Disclosed |
| Origin | United States | USA |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 27/100 | — |
| Speed | — | — |
| Blended price | — | — |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.