MiniMax opens M3.1-Flash weights
On 23 October 2026 MiniMax put the weights of MiniMax-M3.1-Flash on Hugging Face: a multimodal mixture-of-experts model of about 428 billion parameters with 23 billion active per token, taking text, images and video and a context of up to a million tokens. The model had gone live through MiniMax's own API on 19 October with the words that weights would follow. The licence is MiniMax's community licence, free for non-commercial use and conditional for commercial use.
Why it matters
A model that had been offered through MiniMax's API for four days can now be downloaded and run by others, on terms between open source and a closed API: commercial users must show an attribution line and notify MiniMax, and those whose products earn more than 20 million US dollars a year need prior written authorisation. Its stated purpose is coding, agentic work, computer use and cybersecurity, and its published scores are MiniMax's own.
Dates. MiniMax's post of 19 October 2026 (minimax.io) says "Today, we officially roll out MiniMax M3.1 Flash", that it is available through the MiniMax API, M Plan and MiniMax Code, and that "Model weights will be released later." The weights have no dated announcement of their own in the pages read; the date of the record is that of the first commit in the repository's history, 23 October 2026 at 03:37 UTC (a page rendered for a viewer in the US Pacific zone shows it as 22 October 20:37). The repository was created on 17 October and received a second commit on 26 October. What the card says. "Approximately 428B total; 23B activated per token"; text, image and video inputs, text output; MiniMax Sparse Attention throughout the model, quantization-aware training and a DSpark speculative-decoding draft head. The card and the post of 19 October give benchmark scores (for instance 73.7 per cent on DeepSWE v1.1); they are MiniMax's own and not repeated as findings. The licence. The LICENSE file, "MINIMAX COMMUNITY LICENSE" (copyright 2026 MiniMax), grants use "free of charge" "for non-commercial purposes". For Commercial Use of products or services the user must display "Built with MiniMax M3.1-Flash" and, if those products or services generate more than 20 million US dollars in yearly revenue, obtain "a separate, prior written authorization" from MiniMax; below that a one-time notice is enough. Commercial Use includes offering paid services built on the model and deploying fine-tuned versions. An appendix of prohibited uses includes use to "support any military purpose". The record therefore calls the release open weights under a community licence, not open source.