What is a Model Card?
A model card is a short document accompanying a trained machine learning model that describes the model's intended use cases, training data, performance benchmarks, limitations, and ethical considerations. The concept was formalised by Mitchell et al. (2019) at Google.
Model cards are intended to allow practitioners, regulators, and end-users to make informed decisions about deploying or interacting with AI systems.
What is a System Card?
A system card goes a step further — it documents not just the underlying model, but the entire AI system as deployed, including fine-tuning, RLHF, safety mitigations, red-teaming results, and deployment constraints. OpenAI pioneered this format for GPT-4.
System cards are often more relevant from a regulatory standpoint because they reflect what users actually interact with, not just the base model.
EU AI Act relevance
Under the EU AI Act, providers of General-Purpose AI (GPAI) models with systemic risk are required to publish technical documentation that overlaps significantly with the concept of a system or model card. See the EU AI Act page for more detail.
Leading LLMs & Their Documentation
Click "System Card" or "Model Card" to access the official documentation published by each provider.
GPT-4o
OpenAI's flagship multimodal model, capable of processing and generating text, images, and audio in a single model. GPT-4o is the model powering ChatGPT Plus and the OpenAI API.
o3 & o4-mini
OpenAI's reasoning-focused model series, trained with reinforcement learning to "think" through problems step by step before answering. Excels at maths, science, and coding benchmarks.
Claude (Claude 4 Opus / Sonnet)
Anthropic's Claude family is built around Constitutional AI — a technique that trains models using a set of principles rather than purely human feedback. Claude is known for safety, nuance, and long-context capabilities.
Gemini 2.0 / 1.5 Pro
Google's Gemini family spans Flash, Pro, and Ultra tiers. Gemini 1.5 Pro introduced a 1M+ token context window. Gemini powers Google Search AI Mode, Workspace, and the Gemini API.
Llama 3.3 / 4
Meta's open-weights model family, released under a community licence. Llama 3 models range from 8B to 405B parameters. Llama 4 introduces multimodal capabilities and a Mixture-of-Experts architecture.
Mistral Large / Mixtral 8x22B
Mistral AI's flagship proprietary and open-weights models. Mixtral uses a Sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture, activating only a subset of parameters per token for efficient inference at high quality.
Grok-3
xAI's large language model, integrated into X (formerly Twitter). Grok-3 claims strong reasoning and coding performance, with real-time knowledge via its integration with X posts.
Command R+
Cohere's enterprise-focused model, optimised for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and tool use. Command R+ is designed for complex business workflows requiring reliable grounding and citations.
Falcon 180B
Developed by TII in Abu Dhabi, Falcon 180B was among the largest open-access language models at its release. Licensed for commercial use, it achieved top open-source benchmarks upon release.
Amazon Nova / Titan
AWS's family of foundation models available via Amazon Bedrock. Amazon Nova (successor to Titan) spans Micro, Lite, Pro, and Premier tiers, covering text, multimodal, and creative tasks.
IBM Granite
IBM's enterprise-grade foundation model family built for business use cases including legal, finance, and code. Granite models are published with detailed model cards covering training data transparency.
DeepSeek-R1 / V3
High-performance open-weights models from Chinese lab DeepSeek AI, notable for matching frontier model performance at significantly reduced training cost. R1 is a reasoning-focused variant.
Quick Comparison
Summary of model documentation availability and licence type.
| Model | Provider | System / Model Card | Weights Access | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-4o | OpenAI | System Card ✓ | Closed API | Proprietary |
| o3 / o4-mini | OpenAI | System Card ✓ | Closed API | Proprietary |
| Claude 4 Opus | Anthropic | Model Safety Card ✓ | Closed API | Proprietary |
| Gemini 2.0 | Google DeepMind | Technical Report ✓ | Closed API | Proprietary |
| Llama 3.3 / 4 | Meta AI | Model Card ✓ | Open Weights | Llama Community Licence |
| Mixtral 8x22B | Mistral AI | Model Card ✓ | Open Weights | Apache 2.0 |
| Grok-3 | xAI | Limited ∂ | Closed API | Proprietary |
| Command R+ | Cohere | Model Card ✓ | Open Weights (HF) | CC-BY-NC 4.0 |
| Falcon 180B | TII | Model Card ✓ | Open Weights | Falcon Licence |
| DeepSeek-R1 | DeepSeek AI | Model Card ✓ | Open Weights | MIT |
| Granite 3.x | IBM | Model Card ✓ | Open Weights | Apache 2.0 |