Side-by-side comparison of MiniCPM5-1B (OpenBMB) and Phi-4 (Microsoft · USA) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. MiniCPM5-1B is rated conditional; Phi-4 is EU-ready. They part ways on licence: MiniCPM5-1B is "Apache 2.0", Phi-4 is "MIT".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | Conditional Per the published Apache 2.0 LICENSE, the 1.08B-parameter weights carry no use restrictions and are well suited to on-device or edge deployments. Unusually for a Chinese-origin release, OpenBMB ships a full data card naming every pre-training and SFT corpus, which closes the AI Act Art. 53 transparency gap most peers leave open. The remaining hedge for regulated EU buyers is vendor jurisdiction (Tsinghua-affiliated lab, mainland China) — self-host the weights and treat any vendor-side service as out of scope. | EU-ready MIT-licensed 14B from Microsoft Research. Heavy use of synthetic training data is disclosed; English-primary (thin multilingual coverage). Strongest small-model option for permissive-licence EU deployments. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-05-30 | 2026-04-15 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | Apache 2.0 | MIT |
| Commercial use | Unrestricted | Yes |
| Training data | Documented | Partial |
| Origin | China | USA |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | — | 10/100 |
| Speed | — | 29 tok/s |
| Blended price | — | $0.22/M |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.