Side-by-side comparison of Grok-2 (xAI · USA) and Qwen 3.5 (Alibaba · China) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. Grok-2 is rated conditional; Qwen 3.5 is conditional. They part ways on licence: Grok-2 is "Grok 2 Community", Qwen 3.5 is "Apache 2.0".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | 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+. | Conditional Hybrid Gated-DeltaNet + MoE flagship (397B total, 17B active) under Apache 2.0. Native vision, 201 languages, 262K context (1M with YaRN). Licence is clean; Chinese-origin alignment and supply-chain considerations persist. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-16 | 2026-04-15 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | Grok 2 Community | Apache 2.0 |
| Commercial use | Yes (w/ AUP) | Yes |
| Training data | Undisclosed | Undisclosed |
| Origin | USA | China |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 14/100 | 40/100 |
| Speed | — | 53 tok/s |
| Blended price | — | $1.35/M |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.