Side-by-side comparison of IBM Granite 4.1 8B (IBM · USA) and Qwen3-8B (Alibaba Cloud (Qwen) · China) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. IBM Granite 4.1 8B is rated EU-ready; Qwen3-8B is conditional. They part ways on training data: IBM Granite 4.1 8B is "Disclosed", Qwen3-8B is "Token count only".
| 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 Based on published licence terms, Qwen3-8B is released under standard Apache 2.0 with no field-of-use carve-outs, making self-hosted commercial deployment viable. Training-data disclosure is limited to a token count and Chinese origin creates EU AI Act Art. 53 transparency and data-transfer risks that deployers should document. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-05-03 | 2026-04-17 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | Apache 2.0 | Apache 2.0 |
| Commercial use | Unrestricted | Unrestricted |
| Training data | Disclosed | Token count only |
| Origin | USA | China (Hangzhou) |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | — | 11/100 |
| Speed | — | 86 tok/s |
| Blended price | — | $0.31/M |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.