# MBZUAI Releases Six Apache 2.0 K2 Horizon Open Models

> The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence has released K2 Horizon, a family of six models spanning from a tiny 0.9-billion-parameter version up to a 375-billion-parameter flagship, all under a permissive Apache 2.0 license. What sets the release apart is the level of openness: not just the weights, but the training code and documentation of the data behind them. That distinction matters. Most so-called open models today ship weights only, leaving researchers to guess at how they were built. Full transparency lets outsiders audit, reproduce, and modify the entire pipeline, which is much closer to the original spirit of open source. The release also underscores how AI research is spreading beyond the usual US and Chinese labs. An Abu Dhabi institution training frontier-scale models on regional compute and datasets is a reminder that the field's center of gravity is becoming genuinely global.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: AI Weekly · Published Saturday, September 5, 2026_

## Wortins' read

The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence has released K2 Horizon, a family of six models spanning from a tiny 0.9-billion-parameter version up to a 375-billion-parameter flagship, all under a permissive Apache 2.0 license. What sets the release apart is the level of openness: not just the weights, but the training code and documentation of the data behind them. That distinction matters. Most so-called open models today ship weights only, leaving researchers to guess at how they were built. Full transparency lets outsiders audit, reproduce, and modify the entire pipeline, which is much closer to the original spirit of open source. The release also underscores how AI research is spreading beyond the usual US and Chinese labs. An Abu Dhabi institution training frontier-scale models on regional compute and datasets is a reminder that the field's center of gravity is becoming genuinely global.

## Source

[Read the full story at AI Weekly](https://aiweekly.co/ai-news-today/edition/2026-09-04)

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