ESM C / ESMFold2 (esm package)
Newer ESM protein world-model family with folding, now MIT licensed.
EvolutionaryScale / Chan Zuckerberg Biohub
What it does
Newer ESM encoder family (ESM C). Input: a protein sequence; output: embeddings and likelihoods at better quality-per-parameter than ESM-2, as a drop-in replacement for representation and scoring workloads.
Commercial use
Commercial use OKLicence as writtenMIT License
LICENSE.md in the repo is MIT (Copyright 2026 Chan Zuckerberg Biohub) and the README's Licenses section states the models are available under the MIT license. Note this differs from the earlier ESM3 non-commercial community license; verify the checkpoint you actually download.
The licence read at the source allows use by a company. Attribution or copyleft conditions may still apply — read the note.
Is commercial use free of charge?
Free for commercial useFree: the esm repository's licence file is MIT (Copyright 2026 Chan Zuckerberg Biohub) and the open checkpoints are downloadable without payment. The maintainers also sell hosted API access to the larger models, which is optional.
Price and rights are separate: this panel is about money, the panel above is about permission.
When to use it
Use for the strongest open ESM-family embeddings/folding where license matters. Large weight downloads and newer API; older ESM3 checkpoints may still carry different terms.
Facts
- Maker
- EvolutionaryScale / Chan Zuckerberg Biohub
- Cost for commercial use
- Free for commercial use
- Category
- Protein language models
- Compute
- Heavy GPU
- Open weights
- Yes
- Licence
- MIT License
- Official site / repo
- github.com/evolutionaryscale/esm
- Paper
- biorxiv.org
- Last verified
Get told when a licence changes
Licences on these tools do change. One short email when a status flips or a tool is added. No other use of your address.