ERNIE 5.5 License Shuts Out EU, UK and Korea

Baidu on Nov. 5 released the weights of ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base, a 280-billion-parameter language model, on Hugging Face under a custom license that excludes the European Union, the United Kingdom and South Korea. Anyone can download the files, but the license grants no rights in those three places, and Baidu has not said why.

Key takeaways

• The license defines its Territory as everywhere except the EU, the UK and South Korea, and bars use, modification, distribution or display of the model or its outputs outside it.
• Commercial use is free up to $50 million in related annual revenue, with a one-time notice to Baidu and a "Powered by ERNIE" label. Above that, written authorization is required.
• Baidu reports the best score on 24 of 30 benchmarks against three rival base models, but those results are self-reported.

What the ERNIE 5.5 license prohibits

The ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base Model License Agreement v1.0 defines Territory in Section 1.11 as "all geographical areas worldwide other than the European Union, the United Kingdom and South Korea." The United States, Japan and China are therefore inside it.

Section 5.3 goes further: the materials, derivative models "and their Outputs must not be used, reproduced, modified, distributed or displayed outside the Territory." Distributors must also pass the restriction on to downstream recipients, so fine-tuned versions inherit it.

The wording turns on where the activity happens, not where a company is based, Austrian outlet Trending Topics noted. Whether a company in an excluded market could run the model only on servers elsewhere is left unresolved by the text, Korean data firm Pebblous wrote in its analysis.

Other strings attached

Section 5.5 forbids using the model or its outputs to improve any other AI system. Section 6.6 ends the license automatically if the licensee files an intellectual property suit over the model. Disputes go exclusively to Hong Kong courts, and the acceptable use policy bans military use.

ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base specs and benchmarks

The model card describes a sparse mixture-of-experts model that activates 14 billion parameters per token. It was pre-trained on 33.5 trillion tokens, and supports 1 million tokens for fine-tuning and inference.

It is a base checkpoint with no mid- or post-training, so it is raw material rather than a chatbot. In tests Baidu ran itself, it led 24 of 30 benchmarks against DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Base, Hy3-preview-Base and MiMo-V2.5-Base. Trending Topics reported no independent evaluations yet.

Why South Korea and the EU are excluded

Neither the license nor the model card gives a reason. Trending Topics pointed to the EU AI Act as the obvious explanation, and South Korea's AI Basic Act took effect Jan. 22, but any link remains inference.

ERNIE 4.5 shipped under Apache 2.0 in 2025. Pebblous also noted that MiniMax limited free use of its H3 video model weights in the U.S., EU, UK and South Korea in August, citing regulation and copyright disputes. By contrast, Mistral, which closed a €3 billion round in September, released Large 4 on Oct. 29 under a modified MIT license.

What's next

Baidu says a post-trained ERNIE 5.5 Flash "will follow" but gave no date. Whether it keeps the territory clause is the next thing to watch.

FAQ

Can developers in South Korea or the EU use ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base?
The license grants them no rights to use it there, even for non-commercial work.

Is ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base open source?
Its weights are downloadable, but territorial limits and revenue conditions make it a custom-licensed open-weight model rather than Apache- or MIT-style software.

References

• LICENSE · baidu/ERNIE-5.5-Flash-Base — Baidu, Hugging Face (Nov. 5, 2026)
• baidu/ERNIE-5.5-Flash-Base — Hugging Face model card
• ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base — Baidu ERNIE Team (Nov. 5, 2026)
• Baidu Bars Its New A.I. Model ERNIE 5.5 From Europe — Trending Topics (Nov. 6, 2026)
• Baidu's ERNIE 5.5, the Open Model Korea Is Not Licensed to Use — Pebblous (Nov. 8, 2026)
• South Korea's AI Basic Act: Overview and Key Takeaways — Cooley (Jan. 27, 2026)