Lion Cipher Lab
Read a model card and its license before you use an AI model
- AI Security
- Beginner
- ~30 min
- Free · no account required
Why it matters
Grabbing an AI model is as easy as downloading an app, and that ease hides two questions people skip: is this model any good for what I need, and am I even allowed to use it the way I plan to? A model card answers the first — what the model was trained on, what it is meant for, and where it is known to fail or to be biased. The license answers the second, and this is where costly mistakes happen: a model can be free to download yet forbid commercial use or redistribution, because "open weights" is not the same as "open source." Building a product on a model whose license does not permit your…
What you'll learn
- reading a Hugging Face model card
- finding intended use, training data, and limitations
- reading an AI model license
- telling open weights from open source
- checking whether a license permits your use before adopting a model
Steps in this lab
- The trap: downloading a model is not the same as being free to use it
- What a model card is
- Open a real model card and find the intended-use and training-data sections
- Find the limitations and bias section — and take it seriously
- What a license is — and why "open weights" is not "open source"
- Hands-on: read a permissive license (Apache-2.0 or MIT) on the model page
- Hands-on: compare with a restricted license (the Llama community license)
- Your checklist before adopting a model