YOLOv12 is an attention-centric real-time object detection model developed by researchers at Tsinghua University, with the arXiv paper published in February 2025 under the AGPL-3.0 license. It introduces an Area Attention module that partitions feature maps into regions and applies self-attention within each region, reducing the quadratic complexity of full self-attention while capturing long-range dependencies. It also incorporates R-ELAN for improved feature aggregation and scaled residual connections for training stability.
YOLOv12-L achieves 54.0% AP on COCO, while the YOLOv12-N variant achieves 40.5% mAP at 1.62ms latency on an NVIDIA T4 GPU. The model is built on the Ultralytics codebase, supporting detection, segmentation, and other standard YOLO tasks at competitive real-time speeds.
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YOLOv12 is released under AGPL-3.0, the most restrictive of the common model licenses. AGPL-3.0 requires the user to open-source any code changes they make, including the code of any other projects that connect directly to the model, so the YOLOv12 license usually means a separate commercial license for business use.
Serving YOLOv12 behind an API or inside a hosted product counts: AGPL-3.0 reaches the code of other projects that connect directly to the model, which is what catches most commercial deployments by surprise.
Read the full AGPL-3.0 license ↗In practice, using YOLOv12 in a commercial product or service, including one users reach over a network, means open-sourcing your application code under AGPL-3.0 or buying a commercial license. Deploying on Roboflow includes a commercial YOLOv12 license for every user, including the free plan; commercial self-hosting is an Enterprise add-on. Licensing details. Need a permissive license? RF-DETR is Apache 2.0.
Do not hesitate to reach out with questions for your commercial project — our team will help you start solving business problems on the first call. See Roboflow commercial licensing for the models included in each plan.
Talk to salesYOLOv12 is licensed under an AGPL-3.0 license.
This means that YOLOv12 is available for private and commercial use, but that you will need to follow specific conditions. For commercial use, you need to follow AGPL-3.0 conditions or purchase a license for commercial use, modifications, and distribution.
Using an AGPL-3.0 licensed model is conditioned on making available complete source code of licensed works and modifications, which include larger works using a licensed work, under the same license. Copyright and license notices must be preserved. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. When a modified version is used to provide a service over a network, the complete source code of the modified version must be made available.
YOLOv12 is released under AGPL-3.0. In practice, using it in a commercial product or service, including one users reach over a network, means open-sourcing your application code under AGPL-3.0 or buying a commercial license. Deploying on Roboflow includes a commercial YOLOv12 license for every user; commercial self-hosting is an Enterprise add-on (details). Need a permissive license? RF-DETR is Apache 2.0.
AGPL-3.0 closes the "SaaS loophole" in GPL-3.0: even hosting the model behind an API counts as distribution and triggers the source-disclosure requirement.
License information is provided as a guide and is not legal advice.