The weights are public. The licence still asks large commercial users to knock.
On 23 October 2026, MiniMax published MiniMax-M3.1-Flash on Hugging Face after a 19 October API launch that had promised a later weight drop. The model card sells agentic coding, computer use, and cybersecurity scores at aggressive API prices. The Community Licence underneath is the sharper Monday fact: downloadable weights with attribution and a $20 million yearly-revenue authorisation line.
MiniMax ships M3.1 Flash weights under its Community Licence
MiniMax's 19 October blog introduced M3.1 Flash as a next-generation Flash model for agentic tasks, coding, computer use, and cybersecurity, with claimed near-threefold inference speed gains and about 70% lower usage cost versus its predecessor. The post lists flat API pricing at $0.15 per million input tokens, $0.60 output, and $0.015 cached input. The company said weights would follow.
The Hugging Face repository MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M3.1-Flash appeared publicly on 23 October under licence name minimax-community. The card describes a native multimodal mixture-of-experts model with approximately 428 billion total parameters and 23 billion activated per token, text/image/video inputs, text output, and a context window up to 1 million tokens.
Sparse attention throughout, quantization-aware training, and a DSpark speculative-decoding draft head are listed as the main efficiency changes from M3. Recommended serving paths include SGLang, vLLM, and TokenSpeed.
API buyers and self-host teams both sit inside MiniMax's terms
MiniMax ships the API, M Plan, and MiniMax Code products from the 19 October post, and now the Hub weights. Self-host teams that fine-tune or serve the model for a fee are commercial users under the licence text. Non-commercial researchers can use the Software without the revenue gate, subject to copyright notice and the prohibited-use appendix. Competitors reading the CyberGym and DeepSWE rows are looking at MiniMax's own evaluation table.
A public weight drop that still bills as open weights with a revenue gate
The concrete change on 23 October is the weight release plus the Community Licence file. Non-commercial use is granted free of charge with notice retention. Any Commercial Use requires prominent display of "Built with MiniMax M3.1-Flash." Products or services above $20 million US dollars in yearly revenue need separate prior written authorisation via api@minimax.io; below that line, a one-time notice email is required. Commercial Use explicitly includes paid products that rely on the model, commercial API hosting of the model or derivatives, and commercial deployment of post-trained or fine-tuned derivatives. An appendix bars military use among other prohibited categories.
Benchmarks, OSI status, and authorisation turnaround stay MiniMax's
The API launched on 19 October 2026; the weights and Community Licence file followed on 23 October. Public API rates are set on the launch post, but weight authorisation fees above the revenue line are unset on the licence text itself. Whether a given host can use the full 1M context depends on GPU memory and the serving stack. Hugging Face tags the licence as other / minimax-community, and the appendix bars military use among other prohibited categories.
Vendor benchmark rows (BankerToolBench 76.2, DeepSWE v1.1 73.7%, OSWorld V2 61.7, Agents' Last Exam 29.6, CyberGym 82.2) are MiniMax's figures. Independent third-party confirmation on your workloads remains unsettled. How quickly MiniMax answers authorisation requests above $20M is unset on the Hub card.
Read the revenue line before you treat the Hub mirror as Apache-class
Legal and procurement teams should classify any fee-bearing product that embeds or serves M3.1 Flash under the Commercial Use definition, add the required attribution string, and send either the notice or the authorisation request before launch. Platform teams comparing Flash SKUs should price the API against self-host GPU cost and the licence friction above $20M revenue. Ignore marketing shorthand that collapses this drop into OSI open source; the licence text is the instrument.