IBM Granite 4 overview and key facts (October 2026)

IBM Granite 4 is a family of small open language models for business applications, released under Apache 2.0 in 3B, 8B and 30B sizes and backed by IBM's ISO 42001-certified AI management system.

Granite 4.2 is the current generation in 3B, 8B and 30B sizes, following Granite 4.1 released on April 29, 2026. The instruct models handle summarization, classification, extraction, question answering, RAG and code tasks and support 12 languages including English, German, French and Japanese. The wider Granite family adds speech, vision, guardrail, embedding and time-series models. They are available on Hugging Face, watsonx.ai, Ollama and LM Studio.

• Extracts and classifies business documentsSmall Granite models handle extraction and classification at low cost. Back-office teams automate routine document work on modest hardware.
• Answers questions from internal sourcesRAG support grounds answers in company documents. Help desks give consistent answers from their knowledge base.
• Adds guardrails to AI applicationsGranite Guardian models detect harmful content. IT teams add a safety layer in front of other models.

• IBM provides standard IP indemnification for Granite without requiring counter-indemnity from the customer.
• ISO/IEC 42001 certification for the Granite AI management system.

IBM is headquartered in Armonk, New York.

Self-hosting means your team runs, secures and updates the model, including GPU capacity, monitoring and patching. Check the license terms for commercial use and keep a record of which version you deploy. If outputs feed decisions about people, a human must stay in the loop. The IP indemnification applies under IBM's contract terms, so check whether you use Granite via watsonx or only the open weights.

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