Side-by-side comparison of IBM Granite 4.1 8B (IBM · USA) and Grok-2 (xAI · USA) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. IBM Granite 4.1 8B is rated EU-ready; Grok-2 is conditional. They part ways on licence: IBM Granite 4.1 8B is "Apache 2.0", Grok-2 is "Grok 2 Community".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | EU-ready Per the published model card, Granite 4.1 8B is an Apache 2.0 9B-parameter dense decoder with a 131k-token context, sourced from publicly-available datasets, internal synthetic data and human-curated material. IBM continues the unusual-for-the-industry training-data transparency that anchored the Granite 3 family, and offers IP indemnification when the model is consumed via watsonx — a strong default for regulated enterprise pilots that need a defensible weights-available alternative to hyperscaler frontier models. | 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 | 2026-05-03 | 2026-04-16 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | Apache 2.0 | Grok 2 Community |
| Commercial use | Unrestricted | Yes (w/ AUP) |
| Training data | Disclosed | Undisclosed |
| Origin | USA | USA |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | — | 14/100 |
| Speed | — | — |
| Blended price | — | — |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.