MiniMax M3: open-weights 428B MoE with 1M context and native multimodality
Partly confirmed
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra32 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen62 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.71 day after its cutoff
It is after the cutoff of GPT-6 Astra, Gemini 4 Hydrogen and Grok 4.7, and can be in the training data of Claude Opus 5.5.
Key facts
- ~428B total / ~23B active parameters; 1M-token context (third-party write-ups)
- Reported SWE-bench Verified 80.5% and SWE-Bench Pro 59.0% (vendor claims via secondary sources)
- Price: $0.28/M input, $1.10/M output (OpenRouter-listed)
- Follow-ups per MiniMax release notes: Music-3.0 (2026-07-16), H3 omni-modal video model with native stereo audio (2026-07-31)
What happened
MiniMax, which listed in Hong Kong in January 2026, shipped M3 as its flagship coding/agent model. Official release notes list the M2.5 (Feb), M2.7 (Mar 18, “beginning the journey of recursive self-improvement”) and M3 (Jun 1) cadence, then the H3 video model on 2026-07-31 (“understands creative intent across multimodal context — text, image, video, and audio”).
Why it matters
M3 made 1M context + native multimodality + frontier-ish coding available as open weights at ~1/20th of Western frontier prices.
Sources
4 sources from 4 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 2 primary, 2 press
Primary
- MiniMax API docs: model release notesplatform.minimax.io, official
- OpenRouter: MiniMax M3openrouter.ai, docs
Press
- Fireworks: MiniMax M3 is livefireworks.ai, press
- DataNorth: MiniMax launches M3datanorth.ai, press
Changes
- Filed