Meta released Llama 2. Unlike its predecessor, which was research-only, it was free for both research and commercial use, with weights and code published for the pretrained models and for versions fine-tuned for dialogue. The announcement was made jointly with Microsoft as preferred partner: Llama 2 was available through the Azure AI catalogue and ran locally on Windows, as well as through Amazon Web Services and Hugging Face. Meta red-teamed the models before release and shipped a transparency schematic, a responsible use guide, and an acceptable use policy alongside them. It was the point at which publishing weights and permitting commercial use came together, and it set the reference for what would be called open-weight distribution — the yardstick still used when OpenAI released gpt-oss in August 2025.