Meta shipped a 30-billion-parameter agent model on 10 August under Apache 2.0. Everyone read the licence as an exemption. It is closer to a transfer.
Muse Glimmer is dense, tuned for tool use and long tasks. Meta's own post puts full precision above 55 GB and the 4-bit build under 20 GB — the card already in your workstation.
Now the European part.
Article 53(2) lifts two duties for a model released under a free and open-source licence with public weights: 53(1)(a), the Annex XI technical documentation, and 53(1)(b), the Annex XII pack owed to you downstream. The copyright policy at (c) and the training-data summary at (d) survive it.
Here is the clause nobody quotes.
The Commission's guidelines of 18 July 2025 set an indicative criterion for when a downstream modifier becomes the provider of a general-purpose AI model: the modification's training compute exceeds a third of the original model's. Where the original figure is unknown, the fallback is a third of 10^23 FLOP.
Meta's post does not state Muse Glimmer's training compute. There is no denominator, so the fallback applies — and the reason it is missing is the exemption itself. Annex XI Section 1 point 2(c) is "the computational resources used to train the model".
Rough 6ND arithmetic — mine, not theirs — puts a third of 10^23 FLOP near 180 billion tokens of continued pre-training on a 30B dense model. A LoRA never gets close; a serious continued-pretraining run is in the neighbourhood. Against a frontier base, a third of its own compute sits a hundred times higher. The fixed fallback bites hardest exactly where small open models get modified.
And the exemption does not travel. It attaches to how a model is released, not to what it descends from. Ship your fine-tune with private weights and 53(1)(a) and (b) come back — owed by you, to your users.
What I'd do Monday:
1. Instrument training runs to emit a FLOP count. You cannot argue a threshold you never measured. 2. Ask your base provider for its training compute in writing. 3. Treat the release licence as an architecture decision. 4. Write the Annex XII pack for your own fine-tune before a customer asks.
Open weights moved the duty. They did not delete it.
Which of your fine-tunes has a measured FLOP count on file this morning?
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