What is the 700 million monthly-active-user clause in Meta's Llama Community License?

## What the clause actually says Every Meta Llama release — Llama 2 (2023) through the Llama 3.x line and Llama 4 — ships under a *Community License Agreement* rather than a standard open-source licence. The agreement grants a non-exclusive, worldwide, non-transferable, royalty-free limited licence to use, reproduce, distribute, copy, create derivative works of, and modify the "Llama Materials" (the weights, documentation, and code released with them). That grant covers commercial use out of the box: you do not pay Meta per token, per seat, or per deployment. The carve-out is a scale trigger. The additional-commercial-terms section states that if, on the release date of that Llama version, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for the licensee, or the licensee's affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, the licensee must request a licence from Meta, which Meta may grant in its sole discretion; until Meta expressly grants it, the licensee is not authorised to exercise any of the rights under the agreement. ## Why the wording is unusual Three words carry all the weight. **"On the release date."** The count is a snapshot fixed at the moment Meta ships that version, not a continuously monitored limit. A company at 5 million MAU when Llama 4 shipped does not fall out of compliance for that version by reaching a billion users two years later. This is genuinely different from a typical SaaS tier limit, and candidates routinely get it wrong by describing an automatic revocation on growth. **"Or the licensee's affiliates."** The count aggregates across corporate affiliates, not just the product embedding Llama. A small subsidiary of a very large consumer platform is over the line even if its own app has a thousand users. **"Products or services made available by or for Licensee."** It is total product reach, not AI-feature reach. The MAU of your whole messaging app counts, not only the users who touched the Llama-backed feature. ## Who is actually affected In practice this is a handful of companies worldwide — the very large consumer platforms that are Meta's direct competitors. It is widely read as a competitive clause aimed at them rather than a revenue mechanism. For every normal enterprise, startup, or internal tool the trigger is irrelevant, and the correct interview answer says so plainly rather than treating it as a general commercial restriction. But the clause still matters to everyone for two reasons. It is one of the two terms (the other being the acceptable-use restrictions) that keeps Llama from qualifying as open source under the Open Source Definition, because open-source licences may not discriminate against particular persons, groups, or fields of endeavour. And it is a question you will be asked in a design review: "can we ship this?" deserves a specific answer, not a shrug. ## Per-version agreements Each Llama release has its own agreement — the Llama 2 Community License, the Llama 3 Community License, the Llama 3.1 Community License, and so on. They are not identical documents, and adopting a new version means accepting a new agreement, with a fresh MAU snapshot taken on that version's release date. A team that vetted Llama 2 in 2023 has not thereby vetted the release it is running today. Practically, this means the licence review is per-version, and the diff between versions is the interesting part: naming and attribution requirements, permission to use outputs for training other models, and regional carve-outs have all changed between releases. ## How to handle it operationally Record, per Llama version you deploy, the version name, its release date, your organisation's group-wide MAU at that date, and a copy of the agreement text as of the date you accepted it. That artefact is what legal will ask for, and it is cheap to keep. If your organisation is anywhere near the threshold — or is a subsidiary of something that is — the answer is not to estimate; it is to route the question to counsel and, if needed, to request the licence from Meta before shipping.