Open SourceSafetyGovernanceMLOps

Open-Weight Models: Governance, Fine-Tuning, and Safety Gates

8 min read
Open-Weight Models: Governance, Fine-Tuning, and Safety Gates

Open-weight models expand innovation, but they require stronger governance: provenance, fine-tune controls, and deployment-time safety checks.

Why governance matters

When you self-host, you inherit responsibilities normally handled by vendors: patching, monitoring, abuse prevention, and incident response.

Governance is not bureaucracy—it’s the system that keeps your product reliable as it scales.

Safety gates

Add input filtering, tool allow-lists, and output policy checks. Evaluate fine-tunes before shipping and keep a rollback plan.

Maintain a model registry with lineage: base checkpoint, fine-tune data sources, and evaluation results.