Model card

How it works

A model card is a document describing a model: who made it, intended and out-of-scope uses, training data at a high level, evaluation results, known limitations and ethical considerations. The format was proposed in the research paper 'Model Cards for Model Reporting' (Mitchell et al.) and is now widely used.

The level of detail varies widely, from a short page to a long technical report. Open-weights releases often ship a card next to the weights, and some makers call their longer release report a system card instead.

Read the intended and out-of-scope uses before building, and check the limitations against your use case. On this site, card facts come from the maker's own card with page or section references.

Worked example

Illustrative: a card lists medical diagnosis as out of scope and notes weaker results in low-resource languages. A team planning a triage assistant in Swahili now knows to run its own evaluation, add clinician review, or choose another model.

Common mistakes

• 1Skipping the out-of-scope section and building exactly what it warns against.
• 2Assuming the card's evaluation results reflect your data.
• 3Not re-reading the card when a new model version ships.