Open Weights DeskWhich video models you can actually download, which you cannot, and what the difference costs.

Four things people mean by an open video model, and how to tell which one you are being sold

"Open" is doing too much work in this category. Here are the four distinct claims it gets used for, in decreasing order of how much they give you, with the test for each.

1. Published weights under a permissive licence

The strong version. Checkpoints you can download, under a licence that lets you use, modify, redistribute and commercialise.

Test: a repository with actual checkpoint files and a named licence — Apache 2.0, MIT. Not a model card describing an API. Not a licence with a revenue ceiling or a field-of-use restriction, which are real terms in this space and are not what most people mean by permissive.

Wan 2.2 passes this test. Wan 3.0 does not; there is nothing to download.

2. Published weights under a restricted licence

The same files, with conditions: no commercial use above some threshold, no competing services, named prohibited applications, or a requirement to display attribution in output.

This is common and it is not dishonest — it is just a different deal, and the difference usually surfaces at the exact moment it becomes expensive, which is when the thing you built starts making money.

Test: read the licence file, not the README. Search it for "commercial", "revenue", "competing" and "prohibited". If the README says "open source" and the licence file has a revenue clause, believe the licence file.

3. Open architecture, closed weights

A published paper or reference implementation with no released checkpoints. Genuinely valuable to researchers, and worth nothing to someone who wants to generate a video this afternoon.

Test: are there weights? If the repository contains only training and inference code, this is category three.

4. Free to use through somebody's interface

No weights, no licence to you at all — just an endpoint that currently costs nothing, or a free tier.

This gets called "open" constantly and it is the weakest version, because everything about it is revocable by a party that is not you. Free tiers end, endpoints get deprecated, prices get introduced.

Test: could you keep running this if the company disappeared tomorrow? If not, it is category four, whatever the marketing says.

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The confusion is structural, not careless

These get conflated because model families move between categories and keep the brand. Wan's open line ended at 2.2; the closed line kept the name and kept shipping. Anyone whose knowledge of the family formed in 2025 holds a true belief about a model that is no longer the current one.

Three questions cut through it in about a minute:

1. Where is the checkpoint file? Not the model card. The file.
2. What does the licence file say about commercial use and about competing services?
3. Which version number do those two answers apply to? This is the one that catches people, because the answer is frequently "not the one you were asking about".

What to check on a hosted service instead

If you are not self-hosting, "open" is the wrong question entirely and it distracts from the ones that matter. Substitutes worth asking of anything running a model on your behalf:

• Which model ID actually ran? Not the brand on the page — the identifier. A site can advertise a current model and route the free tier to a cheaper one, and you would never know from the output.
• Is there a receipt? The upstream task ID and the resolution that actually ran are facts the service has and can print. If it does not print them, it is asking to be trusted about the one thing it is cheapest to lie about.
• What happens to your file? Upstream result URLs in this family expire 24 hours after the job. If the service is not copying finished clips to durable storage, your output has a shelf life you were not told about.
• What does a failure cost? Failed generations are not billed by the upstream vendor. A service that charges you for them anyway is keeping the difference.

Those four are checkable in a couple of minutes and they matter more to the actual experience than the licence status of weights you were never going to download. The one I use as a proxy for the others is the receipt: a service willing to print the model ID and the upstream task ID under every clip has given up the easiest lie in the category, and that tends to correlate with the rest.

wan-3.run prints both, which is the standard I would hold anything in this space to — including, for the avoidance of doubt, my own site.