MiniMax

MiniMax is a Chinese AI company founded in 2021 by Yan Junjie, a former Sensetime executive. The company has raised over $600 million and is known for developing multimodal AI models that span text, voice, image, and video generation.

MiniMax's flagship products include Hailuo AI (a video generation model that produces high-quality short videos from text descriptions) and Talkie (a character-based AI companion app). The company's abab series of large language models power conversational AI products, while its speech synthesis technology is among the most natural-sounding available. MiniMax's ability to develop strong capabilities across multiple modalities (text, image, voice, video) simultaneously distinguishes it from competitors that specialize in a single modality.

MiniMax is backed by Tencent and other major investors, and has built a significant user base in China through its consumer AI products. The company's Hailuo video model has gained international attention for its quality and is accessible outside China through web interfaces, competing with Runway, Pika, and Kuaishou's Kling in the rapidly evolving AI video generation market.

In 2026, MiniMax expanded beyond its consumer roots toward the open-weight frontier. Its M-series foundation models — culminating in M3 — combine frontier-level coding, agentic task execution, native multimodality, and a 1-million-token context window, and MiniMax has begun releasing the model weights openly. 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.