MiniMax

MiniMax is a Shanghai-based AI company founded in 2021 by Yan Junjie, a former SenseTime executive. It listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange in January 2026, and it builds models across text, voice, image, video and music, backed by investors including Alibaba and Tencent.

Its consumer products came first. Hailuo AI, a video generator, and Talkie, a character-based companion app, built a user base of more than 100 million people, and Hailuo competes internationally with Runway and Kuaishou's Kling. Building strong models in several modalities at once, rather than specializing in one, is what set MiniMax apart from most of its Chinese peers.

In 2026 MiniMax moved toward the open-weight frontier. M3, released in June, combines frontier-level coding, agentic task execution, native multimodality and a one-million-token context window. Its weights are public under the MiniMax Community License: non-commercial use is free, commercial use requires a notice to MiniMax, and a product earning more than 20 million dollars a year needs written authorization. That makes the weights downloadable rather than open source. M3.1 Flash, a cheaper model for coding and agent work, launched through MiniMax's API in October, and its weights followed on Hugging Face within days under the same commercial terms. The shift positions MiniMax alongside DeepSeek and Qwen as a serious Chinese open-weight contender rather than a consumer-only specialist.

In August 2026 MiniMax carried that approach into video with H3, a 33 billion-parameter model that generates picture and synchronized 32 kilohertz stereo audio in a single pass, succeeding Hailuo as its flagship video system. Its weights were published, but under a community license that bars use of those weights in the United States, European Union, United Kingdom and South Korea — MiniMax cites the regulatory picture for generative video — leaving the hosted API as the only route in those markets.

On September 10, 2026 Anthropic named MiniMax in a threat intelligence report describing a distinct approach to unauthorized distillation. Rather than buying harvested transcripts from data vendors, Anthropic says MiniMax built its own proxy network service through a shell company with no obvious link to it and no disclosure of the relationship — and that the service offers access only to models developed by Anthropic and OpenAI, carrying no Chinese models at all, including MiniMax's own. Anthropic reads that selectivity as evidence the service existed to harvest exchanges between users and US frontier models for training. MiniMax had not publicly responded at publication, and Anthropic competes with it directly, so this is an allegation resting on one party's inference from its own telemetry.